Benton RSS Feed

Time Warner is in talks to shed much of Time Inc., the country’s largest magazine publisher and the foundation on which the $49 billion media conglomerate was built, according to people involved in the negotiations.

Time Warner is in early discussions with the Meredith Corporation to put most of Time Inc.’s magazines — including People, InStyle and Real Simple — into a separate, publicly traded company that would also include Meredith titles like Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies’ Home Journal. The new company would then borrow money to pay a one-time dividend back to Time Warner, essentially turning what appears to be a corporate spinoff into a sale. The figure being discussed is $1.75 billion, according to the people involved in the negotiations, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations publicly.

As questions persist about the fate of Dish Network’s automatic ad-skipping technology, there is at least one certainty: money talks.

CBS CEO Leslie Moonves has said unless Dish abandons the Hopper DVR, he won’t allow the satellite operator to carry CBS content. But he has also suggested that he would drop that push if Dish paid CBS $5 a month per subscriber. Station groups seem to have the same idea. In court papers, Dish says that affiliate groups have sought an added fee in carriage negotiations "specifically for each customer’s use of AutoHop." (That's the Hopper function that eliminates all ads in a recording.)

Experts say the blocks that keep Chinese users from accessing services like Facebook, Twitter and Google’s online-video unit YouTube, are hurting businesses, slowing their traffic and hindering their use of a new generation of cloud-computing services like those offered by Google.

Akamai Technologies, which provides services to help websites speed up connections, says China's average connection speed ranked 94th globally in last year's third quarter, well behind Asian rivals like Malaysia, at No. 71, and Thailand, at No. 58. The American Chamber of Commerce in China said last year that nearly three-quarters of about 300 businesses it surveyed said unstable Internet access impedes their efficiency. About 40% said China's censorship efforts have a negative business impact. Analysts say one of the main problems for business is that the Great Firewall, the nickname for China's Internet-censoring and filtering technology, kicks in every time a computer in China tries to access a website abroad, slowing down the connection. The government also has failed to build infrastructure that would allow for quicker connections overseas, said David Wolf, a managing partner for the China practice of market consulting firm Allison+Partners.

As the only remaining defendant in the U.S. government's e-books antitrust case, Apple appears headed for a high-stakes trial that could significantly increase company's liability in related litigation.

Apple faces a June 3 trial date over civil allegations by the U.S. Department of Justice that it conspired with five publishers to raise the price of e-books and to fight the dominance of Amazon. At the Apple trial, to be overseen by U.S. District Judge Denise Cote in Manhattan, the Justice Department will seek not monetary damages but a judicial decree that Apple violated antitrust law, court papers said. Among other things, government lawyers want the judge to issue an order enjoining Apple from engaging in any conduct similar to that alleged in the case. Such a judgment could make Apple vulnerable to steep damages in related litigation.