The pressure from a weak local advertising environment appears to have put Morris Communications (the largest owner of MCCC shares) in a challenging position. Those issues appear to have fueled an attractive (from Mediacom’s perspective) sale of Morris’ 28.3 mm MCCC shares via a tax-free cash rich-split to Mediacom. Assuming the 25K-subscriber systems sold had…
We recently noticed that the Cannon Challenge iPhone application was created by Discovery Communications. Cannon Challenge is a free iPhone app that is a copy of a game that Discovery created for their website initially (click here). What makes the game and its success interesting is that it is essentially an advertisement for a Discovery…
Heading into the release of Kung Fu Panda on 6/6/08, investors were generally expecting $400-$450 mm in worldwide box office. The strength of Panda’s international box office (even adjusting for the foreign currency benefit) has led to the film exceeding our above consensus forecasts (we went into the Panda release with a worldwide box forecast…
Since we last wrote about the TWX stub on May 22, 2008 (Click here for report) the stub has moved from $10.98/share to its current value of $12.05/share (see Exhibit A, current TWX price of $16.33 less approximately $4.28/share in TWC value per TWX share, adjusted for the $10.27 to-be-paid dividend). We attribute the 10%…
We are downgrading MCCC to NEUTRAL from Buy, and removing our target price (was $8.50). Four factors drive our decision to shift MCCC back to Neutral: Growth Expectations Have Increased. Our June 2008 upgrade was premised on EBITDA growth notably exceeding expectations. In MCCC’s Q2 earnings release management revised EBITDA growth guidance upward to 8.5%-9.5%…
Southwest Airlines represents about 20% of the passenger traffic in/out of the Orlando airport. Yesterday, Southwest announced its first flight reductions (see Orlando Sentinel blog here), which will include a net reduction of 6 daily Orlando flights. Southwest’s cuts, which are set to begin in January 2009, are less severe than its peers (which are…
Following an abysmal 2Q performance in broadband (DSL) net adds, the RBOCs appear to be getting far more aggressive mid-way through Q3 2008. Verizon over the past week has launched a new DSL promotion (click here), offering Verizon landline voice customers a DSL line free for six months (any level of speed) with pricing of…
While we discussed MTV’s decision to accept political ads for the first time a few weeks ago (click here for blog post), Discovery Communications (owned by DISCA) has also begun to benefit from political advertising. While dollars being spent are relatively small on an absolute basis, given the weakness in the broader economy, new ad…
China Mobile reported Q2 EBITDA that was 3.5% lower than our estimate primarily on ARPU that was weaker than expected. The quarterly release indicated that the “company will actively search for quality overseas telecommunications assets as investment opportunities” and “steadily increase the dividend yield” which we view very positively given the large net cash position,…
After contentious and very public negotiations, Time Warner Cable appears to have reached an agreement in principle to carry the Big Ten Network (BTN). The deal will put BTN on expanded basic cable in Big Ten states where TWC has an estimated 2.2 million subs. Furthermore, we believe TWC has the option to include BTN as part…
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