The Microsoft-Yahoo News and Its Film-Biz Impact

A funny thing happened on my way to querying some analysts on what Jeff Bewkes, as he steps up to the plate replacing Richard Parsons as new CEO of Time Warner, can do with the troubled New Line studio that's under his domain . It seems that despite a certain sexiness to the topic, with one or two film-biz pundits calling for co-chairman Bob Shaye's head (and that of his co-chair Michael Lynne) after a series of New Line reverses, the topic is not even in the Street radar as it awaits Bewkes' moves to bolster his stock price.

Mind you, halfway through the interview calls came the announcement of the unsolicited Microsoft bid for Yahoo. Now that is sexy, albeit in what biologists might call an asexual way. By that I mean that no matter how big a deal--and at an estimated $44.6 billion, it's an industry record and a daunting buy even for Microsoft--it's still a somewhat tame transaction conceptually. Take two companies who need to monetize the web, and who together are lagging well behind Google, and let them intertwine to make a hermaphroditic baby to enter the fray. As venture capitalist Fred Wilson presciently told Portfolio's Sam Gustin, in a story my colleague Jeff Bercovici linked to earlier:

Well, [Yahoo] could very well be sold. Microsoft just had a great quarter and Microsoft has the exact same problem that Yahoo has. Together they could be 30 percent of the search market to Google's 70 percent. Divided, they're each somewhat marginalized, so certainly at a minimum, combining their search businesses makes an enormous amount of sense.

Wilson also made a point that, taken a step further, plays into why none of this is great for Bewkes and his plans for AOL. The exchange:

Portfolio.com: Do you agree with Yahoo C.E.O. Jerry Yang's recent push to make the site "the premier starting point on the Web"?

Wilson: Most adults I know start their Internet session at Google, and most kids I know start their Internet session at either Facebook or MySpace. So it just doesn't seem to me that it's a viable strategy.

By the same token, as investment banker Terence Kawaja pointed out to Fortune,

"If Time Warner wants to sell AOL, their problem is that AOL can only be in play if there's a buyer for it, and this is the most logical buyer: Yahoo or Microsoft,"

Which opinion led an unnamed senior executive at an AOL rival to say, "I now think that they pretty much have to sell, and they also have to sell really quickly,"

The contrary view, said to be held by Bewkes, is that the acquisition move based on a quest for web ad revenues was read inside Time Warner as a validation of the plan to upgrade AOL as an online advertising platform. Barrington Research analyst James Goss recently made stock pickers sit up straight by naming Time Warner as one of his firm's " "best ideas for 2008" based on the thesis that Bewkes will make "the more dramatic structural changes some would like to see."

Goss told me today he sees much promise in the scheme to aggregate a variety of ad-selling web sites under the AOL banner so the portal can earn commissions on the multiplying, diverse ad placements. If it goes into the future in a role similar to that of Yahoo, says Goss, there's cause for optimism--"There are only so many brand names". Without advocating that Bewkes dump AOL--"Remember, though people tend to forget this, AOL is a profit center with a cash flow of a billion or two"--Goss notes, "I don't think they need to be eight companies...they could [shrink] and be more of a content company with a focus on films and publishing, which are increasingly web-oriented anyway." (This possibility, along with a simple hope that the proffer would go up, may have helped Time Warner sniff at Microsoft's rumored $18 billion offer for AOL a couple years back.)

That focus on films of course creates any number of cross-marketing possibilities, which has been a strength for AOL, as reflected by a robust amount of film coverage (though it's had to extricate the film-biz news from their promotional surges); Yahoo has its own comprehensive Hollywood-info destination, just one of its many area of superiority to the MSN site they now could be joining forces with.

Thus there's some logic in having Time Warner cable, another profit center that's been unwieldy and is often touted as the likeliest arm of the business for Bewkes to dump, take one for the team and become AOL's buyer. Ranking along with it in the less-likely territory is the deep-pocketed AT&T, as well as Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, or even Google, which has a stake in AOL already and an ongoing deal (expiring in 2010) to perform the searches for the service.

We'll consider in another post where matters with New Line's Shaye and Michael Lynne stand going forward. But as of earlier this week, Los Angeleno Shaye had been back in his old stomping groundss--and Bewkes' backyard--of New York for about a month. So while he could always be handed a face-saving package that would let him direct films, as he likes to do (witness 2007's The Last Mimzy), after a lengthy life-threatening illness in 2005, he might be ready to keep a hand in as a favorite-son producer and hand the reins to Lynne or some other Bewkes appointee.

Although Shaye's had his share of missteps of late, with The Golden Compass tanking as a hoped-for new franchise, he finally mended fences with Peter Jackson and has the New Zealander's pledge to oversee two Hobbit films for New Line--a nice compact franchise and one that Warner Bros.'s Jeff Robinov, newly empowered with a promotion and with a five-year deal would certainly love to fatten his slate with now that Harry Potter's dwindled down as a guaranteed revenue scoop. (One inside warns that rather than the declared prospect of bringing them out in 2010 and 2011 they're likelier to see cinemas in 2011 and 2012--still making a nice run-up to the expiration of Bewkes' new deal. And in (portfolio contributor) Lloyd Groves smartly detailed New York piece on Bewkes, it's Shaye who's brought on for the final, summarizing two paragraphs of quote. There's a slight edge of doubt about his longtime work pal--as in, "He's a little bit hard to read in an interpersonal sense"--but the ultimate quote doesn't sound like something one says about one's hangman: ""He's going to do things that are going to be recognized as astute and clever moves to fortify the best assets of this company and to rid itself of operations that he feels-certainly with the board's cooperation-are not in the best interests of the corporation."

Meanwhile, down the Burbank street at Disney, all is well and both the media and the analysts are praising a nice run culminating in a stellar 2007. The not surprising update is that Bob Iger, whose history was updated not long ago on this blog, was handed a five-year contract extension with a few nice perk, like a raising of his minimum annual bonus to $10 million. Part of Iger's mastery of his company''s future has derived from his hook-ups with Pixar and Apple, and no doubt he and brother-in-arms Steve Jobs are looking across from their own mountaintop at the at the latest Microsoft move, and having some rather deep thoughts and strategic discussions. The interlaced web, content, technology, ad sales and stock market landscapes changed today, in ways that will unfold with some unpredictability.