New (online) skateboards for CBS, Comcast
Strong winds of change in media-consumption habits seem to have sent a recent chill down the back of CBS President-CEO Leslie Moonves and Comcast Chairman-CEO Brian Roberts.
On Thursday CBS Corp. agreed to buy CNET Networks – and all of its bells and whistles, including BNET, mp3.com, TV.com and ZDNet – for $1.8 billion, and on Wednesday cable king Comcast agreed to acquire social networker Plaxo for an undisclosed price (but TechCrunch and Reuters pegged the price in the $175-million range).
Once the CBS deal closes, CNET Networks sites will be combined with CBS’ stable of interactive sites (CBS.com, CBSNews.com, etc.) and the distribution network of the CBS Audience Network, which consists of more than 300 partner web sites. (The deal most likely renders moot the recent takeover attempt of CNET by an investment group led by New York-based Jana Partners.)
Far as the Comcast-Plaxo deal goes, Plaxo will be part Comcast Interactive Media. Plaxo has been working for about the last year on crafting a universal address book for Comcast’s SmartZone communications center (slated to debut later this year). Plaxo will also host all of the address book account for Comcast webmail users.
Matthew Schwartz is Senior Editor of ScribeMedia.org and host of the WebTV series, From Print to Digital.
Discussion
No comments for “New (online) skateboards for CBS, Comcast”
Post a comment