The hot topic du jour is the contest between Microsoft and Google for some kind of a deal with AOL. And Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons affirmed today during a talk at CSFB’s Global Media Conference (webcast can be found here) that the company is not going to sell either Internet giant a share of AOL.
“We’re not sellers of the asset,” he said. What’s on the table right now is which company can provide the better technological underpinnings to help AOL maximize its ad sales revenues. “If we had more robust technology sitting under our portal to monetize eyeballs, that would be a plus. And two we need to throw more traffic at that aol.com portal because we were late to the party.”
“How all these discussions work out will depend on how we see ourselves achieving those two objectives,” Parsons said, although reading between the lines it sounds like Microsoft might, in fact, have an edge over Google, as press reports have indicated.
Later, when discussing whether Time Warner will thread its vast set of online properties — from CNN.com to turner.com — together to form one potent online advertising vehicle, Parsons said “whether we leverage it through our relationship with Google or we use something else, that’s one of the reasons we’re having these discussions.”
On the cable side of the business, Parsons returned to his usual bullish attitude. “We believe that our cable business will grow both top and bottom-line double-digits throughout our business planning cycle [five years]. Our guys are shooting the lights out” in terms of basic, digital, high-speed and voice service growth.
Parsons danced a little bit when asked whether, like Disney’s Bob Iger, he believes that the movie DVD release window will shorten to the point that it coincides with the theatrical release window. Ever the diplomat, Parsons nodded to Time Warner’s retail affiliates, such as Walmart, that generate heaps of revenues from DVDs, clearly wanting to be as non-confrontational as possible.
But he did ultimately concede that at some point, the windows will shorten dramatically. “I think these various channels of distribution will live together for a while and over time it will be that these windows will shorten over time and eventually they will come together.”
Video distribution over the Internet is also inevitable, but the business models are still very unclear, Parsons said. “The opportunity to mess around in that online space and find the right combination of both content and availability funded through advertising revenues…there will be opportunities that we can’t put our finger on.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 1:56 PM|Comments(0)
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