Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Vivendi

Vivendi Sells 20% NBC Stake To GE For $2 Billion

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 02:16:31 +0000

French media company Vivendi has sold its stake in NBC to G.E. for $2 billion. Vivendi had owned 20% of the broadcasting company. After Comcast completes its acquisition of NBC, Vivendi will sell the remaining 12.34% it owns to G.E. for $3.8 billion. Vivendi CEO Jean-Bernard Levy said that the company can use the sale of NBC to buy 100% of telecommunications operator company SFR. Vivendi owns 56% of SFR. [NYT]

Judge Rules Against Vivendi In Veoh Case; Ruled Veoh Satisfied DMCA Criteria

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:09:27 +0000

“Veoh has shown that when it did acquire knowledge of allegedly infringing material — whether from DMCA notices, informal notices, or other means — it expeditiously removed such material, and UMG has failed to rebut that showing,” stated a court order by the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The Court made a ruling against Universal Music Group for its 2007 lawsuit against Veoh Networks Inc. Whenever Veoh received a DMCA takedown notie, they quickly reacted and removed the material.

UMG failed to show an appropriate rebuttal of Veoh’s proactive removal of copyrighted material. Universal said that the ruling was “wrong” and that they plan to appeal. “The balance between copyright holders and technology that Congress sought in enacting the DMCA has been upended by this decision,” stated Universal Music. The Veoh vs. Universal Music lawsuit was closely watched by media companies because Viacom has a pending lawsuit against Google over copyright material being uploaded on YouTube.

Dmitry Shapiro, the founder of Veoh said that the lawsuit was costly and dragged on for two years. Veoh has venture funding from Goldman Sachs, Time Warner, Spark Capital, Intel, etc.

Veoh raised about $70 million in total funding and is not profitable as of yet, but they expected to be by the second quarter of 2010. Veoh is exploring the possibilities of either selling themselves or raising additional investment.

Vivendi Offers $2.9 Billion For GVT

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:03:16 +0000

French entertainment company Vivendi has made a bid to acquire GVT, a major Brazilian telecommunications company. If the acquisition takes place, Vivendi would become a major competitor of Telefónica of Spain. Vivendi offered $22.95 per share (42 reais) to gain 100% of GVT’s capital.

According to Vivendi CEO Jean-Bernard Lévy, this acquisition would lift the earnings over the next year and will not affect the credit ratings or dividend policy. Telefónica could counter the bid with a deal of their own. Currently Telefónica has a 31% market share in Brazil.

GVT has a 4% market share with 2.3 million customers and $800 million revenue. GVT’s controlling shareholders are the Swarth Group and Global Village Telecom. They agreed to sell at least 20% of their outstanding shares. Vivendi wants at least 51% ownership.

Activision to become part of Vivendi

Mo Kakwan — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:58:01 +0000

Vivendi Games announced Sunday it was acquiring controlling stake in Activision by purchasing 1.7 Billion in stock. In whole the deal is reported to be worth 18.9 Billion.

This makes Blizzavision (Not their real new name, but should be) bigger then Electronic Arts. Which has long touted itself as the Biggest Publisher of Video Games in the World. I remember that well because it was on every other piece of orientation material they handed to me when I began working there. I’m not working there anymore.

Even though this deal means a lot more oomph as far as marketing and product property goes. I’m not sure it’s going to mean it’s as powerful as EA for awhile. EA being brought up to it’s size from the beginning as one large company acquiring allowed it to absorb the data, technology, and human resources in a more clean manner. When working at EA I used to spend hours after work looking at documents in their knowledge database that they made available to all employees from different studios. These were on varying topics and most were particularly in depth.

The amount of information available was staggering. Not only from all the studios but backwards in history too. I came across a document that explained sprite sizing and how to simulate speed with only 2d graphics routines written by one of the graphic programmers for Road Rash 3 for the Sega Genesis! That game came out in 1994 but this relic of a document was alive and accessible in their system. It was like Google for game creation. On top of that, if I read something which I didn’t understand, I could easily contact an individual on the team if not the very individual who wrote the document for clarification. As most game teams have someone who still works at EA. This sort of organization and accessibility can only come from a lot of effort over time. I don’t know if this can be achieved by a merger of two huge players. Not in the near future by any means.

Blizzavision may have the large size now but internally I’m curious how they’re going to tie things together so this merger has positive benefit as they move forward.