Bewkes Revisits AOL Stock Offering
Time Warner COO: Company Lacks Pure-Play Internet Public Currency
By Mike Farrell -- Multichannel News, 5/31/2007 12:34:00 PM
Time Warner chief operating officer Jeffrey Bewkes again raised the specter of a public offering of AOL stock, but he stopped short of suggesting that the online unit be separated entirely from its parent.
At the Sanford Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference Thursday, Bewkes said one of the disadvantages for AOL is that unlike its competition -- Yahoo and Google -- it doesn’t have a pure-play Internet public currency.
“We could create such a currency,” he added. “We’ve certainly contemplated doing that.”
Bewkes did not reveal any particular time frame for such an offering and stopped short of saying that creating that currency would require a full separation from Time Warner.
“I don’t think [a full separation] would be in our interests or the shareholders’ interests at this point,” he said.
He also called for more broadcast and cable networks to offer their programming on-demand.
It is a suggestion Bewkes has made before, most recently at the Cable Show in Las Vegas last month. He pointed to Time Warner’s HBO On Demand product, as well as selected video-on-demand programming that is available from other Time Warner networks.
“We are a little surprised that broadcast networks haven’t moved faster to put their networks on a free, ad-supported, branded basis,” Bewkes said. “There is no strong reason why NBC, ABC [and] TNT can’t have their whole schedule available to you on an on-demand basis, with ad support. It’s not at all difficult for the cable-system industry to give you that. What it is, is a rights question.”
Aside from the difficulty in obtaining the necessary rights, Bewkes said another roadblock to full broadcast schedules on-demand is that broadcasters have tried to use VOD rights as a means to settle other issues with cable operators, particularly retransmission-consent fees.
“That dynamic is clear,” he added. “And as the negotiations between networks and cable operators for things like NBC and MSNBC get cleared up, there really is no obstacle to putting all the networks on-demand. Once that happens, that’s going to be very powerful. It’s a much bigger story; it’s a much bigger money and audience pool than looking at TV shows on the Internet on a PC or looking [at them] on an iPod.”
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