Posts Tagged ‘Jeffrey Bewkes’

The annual Reuters Global Media Summit starts Monday and runs through Thursday in New York, London, Paris, Mumbai, and Taipei, featuring exclusive, private interviews with top executives from media and entertainment companies.

Content from the four-day event can be found on its site, and Reuters Insider subscribers will have exclusive access to live recordings of the interviews.

Executives scheduled to participate include: Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes; Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman; Publicis CEO Maurice Levy; News Corp. deputy chairman, president, and chief operating officer Chase Carey; Financial Times CEO John Ridding; Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello; WPP CEO Martin Sorrell; Disney-ABC Television Group president Anne Sweeney; Pearson chief financial officer Robin Freestone; Star TV India (News Corp) CEO Uday Shankar; Vocento CEO Jose Manuel Vargas; Penguin Books CEO John Makinson; United States Olympic Committee CEO Scott Blackmun; Next Media CEO Jimmy Lai; Kabel Deutschland CEO Adrian von Hammerstein; World Wrestling Entertainment COO Donna Goldsmith; Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick; The New York Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr.; The New York Times CEO Janet Robinson; Take-Two Interactive chairman Strauss Zelnick; Technicolor CEO Frederic Rose; MLB Network CEO Tony Petitti; Major League Baseball Advanced Media CEO Robert Bowman; Informa CEO Peter Rigby; DiBcom CEO Yannick Levy; Motorola Mobility president Daniel Moloney; Blinkx founder and CEO Suranga Chandratillake; and JCDecaux co-CEO and chairman Jean-Charles Decaux.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is a cover boy — specifically, the cover of Fortune, as he was named the magazine’s 2010 Business Person of the Year.

Other tech and media movers and shakers to crack the list of 50 included Apple CEO Steve Jobs (No. 3), Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (No. 4), Baidu CEO Robin Li (No. 6), Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (No. 7), Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos (No. 10), Google CEO Eric Schmidt (No. 11), Zynga CEO Mark Pincus (No. 12), IBM CEO Sam Palmisano (No. 15), salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff (No. 18), Andreessen Horowitz general partner Marc Andreessen (No. 19), Disney CEO Bob Iger (No. 22), Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (No. 24), Pandora founder Tim Westergren (No. 26), Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes (No. 27), DirecTV CEO Michael White (No. 32), Samsung Electronics CEO Geesung Choi (No. 39), Comcast CEO Brian Roberts (No. 43), and Mail.ru Group CEO Yuri Milner (No. 46).

Fortune reporter Peter Newcomb wrote on Hastings:

What does it take to be at the top of business in 2010? We searched for leaders who didn’t just crawl from the wreckage of the Great Recession, but sprinted from it. This year, Hastings has thrown his company’s muscle behind delivering television and movies over the Internet, risking his $2 billion-in-sales DVD-by-mail business. The result: a company that has grown from a gnat to a giant. Now when deals are made in media, the increasingly important question is, “What’s the Netflix piece?”

And Hastings told Fortune:

We are in a new race, and we are a player with some very large and substantial firms. Just to be in that league is an amazing place from where we were.

Time Warner reported a $16 billion fourth quarter loss today with revenue falling 3% to $12.31 billion.

At the AOL unit, revenue fell to $968 million from $1.25 billion (-18% year-over-year) mostly on a drop in advertising.

While AOL has seen higher page views and greater usage, Marketwatch reports, “Declines in display ads on AOL Network sites again drove the decrease in the latest quarter, along with sales of advertising on third-party sites.”

Last month, Time Warner chairman and CEO Jeffrey Bewkes said the company is trying to determine what to do with AOL. The all-stock merger between AOL and Time Warner in 2000 amounted to more than $160 billion based on trading prices at the time. On the day the merger was announced Time Warner saw a share price high of $90.06. Today it is trading around $9.76 per share.

“We’re making progress at Time Warner toward our goals of becoming a more content-focused company and delivering increasing returns to our stockholders,” said Bewkes.

Related: Former Yahoo! Exec Moves to AOL’s Platform-A

Yesterday’s WSJ story is now official: Reuters is reporting that Time Warner plans to split AOL’s dial-up ISP and advertising businesses into separate divisions by early 2009, which could aid in a sale or merger of both pieces. The company has done well in the quarter, but not because of AOL; instead, it reported strong cable TV ad sales for ‘Sex and the City,’ CNN, and other properties.

The report said that the AOL split underlines Time Warner’s aim to create content rather than distribute it; this would seem to signal a shift away from online and mobile initiatives as well. “As we continue to reshape Time Warner, we’ll increasingly focus on our goal to create and manage high-quality branded content,” CEO Jeffrey Bewkes said yesterday. The company also plans to separate from Time Warner Cable, the company’s Internet and cable TV distribution arm.

“A separation of AOL would eliminate what’s been a drag on growth and a management distraction,” said Christopher Marangi, associate portfolio manager at Gabelli & Co, a Time Warner investor, in the report. “We look forward to hearing more about structural alternatives there.”

(Image credit: Nicholas Roberts/Reuters)