Using National Amusements (NAI), the operating company that holds Redstone’s ownership of Viacom, sales of VIA’B stock as a proxy for Viacom’s buyback activity would indicate that Viacom is accelerating its buyback activity since the end of Q2. NAI and Viacom have a selling agreement which maintains NAI’s ownership of Viacom at 11.5%. At the…
CVC filed a new proxy this morning (Click for link to proxy): They finally set a date for a shareholder vote, October 24, 2007. This should give them time to close before having to report earnings (as Pali forecasted, as we believe 3Q earnings will lift cable stocks in generally and could make it harder…
NCMI has just announced (click here for today’s release) an agreement with Marcus Theatres (7th largest exhibition chain) to offer NCMI special events (part of its Fathom division) in 21 of its 49 theaters. This agreement comes less than two months after NCMI signed National Amusements (click here for our prior post) to a similar…
We reduced our EBITDA estimates on Sprint primarily due to higher expense estimates for customer acquisition and retention. Click here for the table that details our revisions. We have increasingly been hearing investors make the argument that Sprint should be valued using a “normalized margin” of 40%. Our first draft of this note, which was…
Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner’s COO (and CEO heir-apparent) is marketing in Boston today, with Dick Parsons speaking at GS next week, Randy Falco and Ron Grant, from AOL speaking at ML next week, and Landel Hobbs from Time Warner Cable speaking at ML as well. In turn, we thought you might like to know the…
NY Magazine published (click here) an interview with Dick Parsons in this week’s issue that gives us even more conviction about our downgrade last week of TWX shares to NEUTRAL and why investors should look elsewhere in the media sector (for our full PDF report from last week: Click Here). Particularly noteworthy is the shifting…
The WSJ (click here) is reporting that Insight has pulled the auction of its cable systems (the half of the company that remains after Comcast takes back subs representing its 50% ownership of the company). The Insight cable assets to be sold were 650K subs with a little under $1.5 bn of net debt (@$4,000…
Yesterday evening, Echostar reached a carriage agreement with the Big Ten Network (co-owned by News Corp. and the Big Ten Conference) for both standard def and HD versions of the network. Click here to read the press release. Now both DBS operators are carrying BTN, while all the large cable operators are refusing. While (cable)…
While we are lowering our cable industry estimates across the board for 2007 following a weaker than expected 2Q 2007, we believe cable equities have over-corrected compared to the relatively modest estimate revisions. Since July 25 (prior to Comcast kicking off Q2 ’07 reporting season for the cable group), publicly traded cable equities have declined…
We have simply lost faith/trust in Time Warner’s executive management team and Board of Directors. Without the confidence that the catalysts we were looking for in our mid-July ’07 upgrade to BUY note will occur anytime soon (meaning at least a $14 bn buyback, split-off TW Cable, and sell AOL/Publishing) and with our full-year ‘07/’08…
You must be logged in to post a comment.