Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Comcast and Disney sitting in a tree . . .

Comcast has made public their offer to purchase Disney as can be read
here in Business Week.

Does this really make sense? It does in my mind. It's really quite simple and very old -- vertical integration. Comcast (i.e., distributor) is trying to buy Disney (i.e., supplier). Basically, if Comcast gets control of Disney, they get control of all the Disney holdings, which include the Disney back library (video-on-demand is the direction cable and satellite companies are going . . . what if you could only see the movies that were "locked in the Disney vault" by being a Comcast subscriber), ABC, and ESPN. Many analysts seem to think that ESPN is the key to the deal, I would say that the Disney library is as, if not more, important.

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