Vivendi to Sell NBC Universal Stake for $5.8 Billion

Vivendi may have played hard to get with Comcast, but it looks like the French media company will be giving up its stake in NBC Universal for $5.8 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal's Jeffrey McCracken and Sam Schechner.

Vivendi's 20 percent stake in NBC Universal had been valued at $5 billion, but executives at Vivendi made it clear that they wouldn't exit their partnership with General Electric cheaply. At $5.8 for 20 percent, NBC Universal is now valued at $30 billion.

The fall's media news has been dominated by Comcast's ongoing negotiations with General Electric over NBC Universal. Rumors of the deal first surfaced in the beginning of October. At one point, Rupert Murdoch's News, Corp. was even allegedly kicking the tires on the network and movie studio.

In today's New York Times, Tim Arango and Bill Carter compare the impending Comcast-General Electric deal to an earlier, ill-fated merger that will be studied in business school's for generations to come: "In its size and melding of distribution of content and distribution, the proposed deal resembles the takeover of Time Warner by AOL."

That merger, which started in 2000, is coming to an end on December 6 after a disastrous decade.

Adding insult to injury, Arango and Carter write, "If Steve Case, the former head of AOL, was the public face of that failed merger, the public face of the proposed NBC-Comcast deal could well be Jay Leno."

Now, that's just cruel.