Patrick McDermott

Time Warner, Inc. (not the cable operator) and CBS Corp. are being encouraged by Wall Street to hurry up and just get married.

As the march towards media consolidation continues, dealmakers are salivating over a combination of CBS and Time Warner that would combine CBS’ programming and popular network with Time Warner’s extensive roster of cable channels and distribution outlets.

A merger “makes a lot of sense,” Michael Morris, a Richmond, Virginia-based analyst at Davenport & Co., told Bloomberg News in a telephone interview. “With the amount of collaboration they do, investors see it as a possibility as well.”

A merger would bring both CBS and the CW Network even closer together and give both companies even more outlets for their programming, forcing higher fees for cable networks and subscribers in the process.

A merger deal involving CBS would run at least $35 billion, and Bloomberg says it would be the biggest U.S. media deal in more than a decade. Time Warner is definitely the larger player among the two companies with nearly twice the market capitalization of CBS.

“Content is king,” according for CBS chairman Sumner Redstone. Program producers, stations and networks involved in programming are now responsible for a significant part of your last cable rate increase as retransmission consent fees continue to rise.

Under that paradigm, mergers and acquisitions are ripe to continue as programmers seek stronger positions to demand higher fees and distributors grow larger to fight for a volume discount.

Sinclair Broadcast Group is a prime example, spending $1.8 billion in the last 18 months buying up local television stations to force more lucrative carriage deals with cable, satellite and telco TV systems.

Among the biggest recent deals: Comcast has completed its acquisition of NBC Universal and Walt Disney, which owns ABC, also now owns Pixar, Marvel Entertainment, and Lucasfilm.

Other coverage you may enjoy:

1. Sinclair and Time Warner Cable Agree to Two More Weeks of Talks; No Blackout Tonight
2. Free Press’ Joel Kelsey Blows Telecom Talking Points Out of the Water on AT&T Merger
3. Must Fee TV: Broadcaster Consent Fees Will Turn ‘Free TV’ Into ‘Fee TV’ For Cable Subscribers
4. It Begins: Wall Street Analyst Calls for Comcast & Time Warner Cable to Merge
5. Opposition Growing More Organized Against AT&T T-Mobile Merger

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The fashion designer leapt onto the conference table, brandishing a plastic butter knife. “CAW!” he shouted, the plastic wings on his back rustling. “Caw, caw! FashionWings(TM) are trademarked! TRADEMARKED! CAW! So nobody BETTER not EVER take my brand name! CAW, CAW!”

With that, he threw a chair through the seventeenth-story window, and leapt out.

You can never start bonding too early.

(submitted by Anthony)

She was never treated any differently.

(submitted by Jeremy)

Every month, the Federal Trade Commission receives 200,000 complaints about illegal robocalls, making it the most common problem reported to the FTC. Although the FTC has shut down some of the companies responsible for the billions of robocalls made in the US, it lacks a technological solution that would stop robocallers from dialing in the first place.

That's why the FTC last October offered a $50,000 prize to whoever could come up with the best technology for stopping robocalls. Today, the FTC announced three winners who devised robocall blocking systems that might help end the scourge forever. Two of the winning proposals detect illegal robocallers and disconnect the call before it can get through to consumers. The third would build a database of bad numbers by having consumers report robocalls.

The $50,000 prize will be split by two co-winners who separately built systems that "focus on intercepting and filtering out illegal prerecorded calls using technology to 'blacklist' robocaller phone numbers and 'whitelist' numbers associated with acceptable incoming calls," the FTC said. "Both proposals also would filter out unapproved robocallers using a CAPTCHA-style test to prevent illegal calls from ringing through to a user."

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As a parent, I’m always looking for ways to send my child rolling down a steep hill, into a lake, onto a busy road, or even over a cliff. That’s why I like the Little Tikes Bumper Wheel.

A client requested I design a calendar. She wanted some of her favourite quotes from philosophers on each page. She asked me to credit the quotes she couldn’t remember the speaker for. Eleven of the months were all philosophy luminaries. March was Optimus Prime. 

3k tip. by remingtonlevine

Under the European Union’s Digital Agenda for Europe, all member states are to offer a minimum level of 30Mbps broadband to everybody by 2020. (Some countries, like Denmark and Finland, are already nearly there.) But last month, over $9 billion designated to accelerate this broadband deployment was slashed from the EU budget as part of massive budget cuts. The cuts have raised doubt about whether the soon-to-be-28-member-nation group will make the 30Mbps goal. But Neelie Kroes, the EU’s Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, is still intent on getting to that ambitious target.

In a new speech in Brussels on Tuesday, “Steelie Neelie” outlined a plan that would take advantage of existing infrastructure and construction sites, as is already the case in some EU member states.

First, she called for unifying regulations: “Why spend extra money and effort duplicating what's already there? So this regulation will ensure telecoms companies know what is already out there and will open up access to it—with fair and reasonable prices and conditions.”

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Passover Flexinn #jewday by marcusbofficial

It has the spirit of the tale.