vivendi

Vivendi announced today that it has agreed to acquire Vodafone's 44 percent stake in French mobile operator SFR for 7.95 billion euros ($11.3 billion).

The deal would give Vivendi, which already owned 56 percent of SFR shares, complete control of SFR--France's second largest carrier, with nearly 21 million customers.

"We are very pleased to reach our strategic objective to own 100 percent of SFR, which will help Vivendi to focus further on profitable growth and innovation," Vivendi CEO Jean-Bernard Levy said in a statement. "I am very confident that this will greatly benefit … Read more

Comcast's chief operating officer will take over as chief executive of NBC Universal once Comcast officially owns a 51 percent majority stake of the media giant, the companies announced today.

Steve Burke will replace NBC Universal CEO and President Jeff Zucker, who announced last week that he will leave the company after a 24-year career there. Until the Comcast deal is final, Zucker will work with Burke on the transition, according to Comcast and NBC Universal parent company GE. No other personnel announcements are expected until the deal closes, the companies added.

Although Zucker told his staff in an … Read more

Updated 5:10 p.m. PDT with information about the financial details of the deal.

Comcast is very close to sealing the deal to acquire NBC Universal, CNBC anchor and reporter David Faber reported Tuesday. The only thing left to do is sign the papers.

Faber said in a story posted on the CNBC Web site that the deal is expected to be formally announced on Thursday. But CNET sources close to the deal say the final details could take longer to tie up, and the final announcement could be pushed back until early next week.

Earlier Tuesday, The New … Read more

Comcast is on a roll this week. On Tuesday it began its public pilot of a bandwidth monitoring system for its customers to figure out exactly how much they're downloading each month. This comes a little more than a year after the company announced it would be capping users at 250GB per month.

More importantly, reports say that General Electric and Vivendi have reached a tentative agreement that helps pave the way for Comcast to buy NBC Universal. If, or rather when, that deal is sealed, Comcast would expand its media reach outside of its service roots into being … Read more

General Electric and French media company Vivendi have reached a tentative agreement, which will clear the path for cable giant Comcast to buy NBC Universal, according to reports in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

The stories cite unnamed sources who say under the terms of the deal GE will buy Vivendi's 20 percent stake in NBC Universal for roughly $5.8 billion. Vivendi's ownership of NBC is one of the hurdles that stood in the way of GE selling the TV and movie company to Comcast in a deal worth about $30 billion.

The … Read more

Over the past decade, video game popularity has grown at an exponential rate. Instead of being the niche market that only a select few cared about, the industry is now worth billions of dollars and has become mainstream.

But as that has happened, video game developers like EA and Take-Two Interactive have become far more business-savvy and done their part in ensuring that they can maximize shareholder value and create an environment where video games are an extremely profitable product.

In the process, the video game industry has been damaged by a slew of mergers and acquisitions and in the process, some of the most profitable genres (first-person shooters and sports games, for example) have been copied and refreshed so many times over that gaming has quickly become derivative and bereft of innovation.

And although the main culprit for the lack of innovation is obviously the Almighty Dollar, another culprit is lurking in the shadows and quietly damaging the foundation of gaming as we know it--acquisitions.… Read more

Now that the deal between Vivendi and Activision has been officially announced, it looks like the former will take two-thirds control in the popular developer and be able to compete more effectively against the video game industry's de facto big shot--EA.

And while the $1.7 billion will allow Vivendi to become a more "complete" organization that can offer a wide array of games for people on all platforms, I just can't see how this will benefit any consumers.

Sure, the merger between Vivendi and Activision will finally create a competitor for the behemoth that is EA and with Activision's current streak of 74 percent growth since 2003 as compared to EA's paltry 25 percent, it's certainly possible that the former could overtake the latter in terms of size within the next decade.

But is an environment where two major video game developers control a significant stake of the market really beneficial to consumers? Unfortunately, the answer is no.… Read more

I woke up this morning to news that France's Vivendi has agreed to buy a controlling interest in Activision, perhaps creating the world's-largest independent video game company.

The new entity will be known as Activision Blizzard--a suitable name based on the fact that Activision has the best-known video game brand in the new company, but that Vivendi's Blizzard Entertainment unit also produces World of Warcraft, one of the most successful massively multiplayer online games of all time.

But what is not clear is whether the new company will be able to achieve something that is clearly part … Read more