TW: AOL not for sale
Parsons pushes deal to pump growth
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He cautioned that recent fawning over the Netco may be overdone -- as were predictions of its demise.
"AOL was never as dead as people proclaimed it was," Parsons said at the CSFB media conference Thursday. "Now, I'm reading 'jewel in the crown.' It's gone from a dog to a diamond."
AOL's been talking with Google and Yahoo! about partnering.
Parsons said AOL hasn't "achieved stability on the narrowband side," meaning dial-up customers continue to migrate to broadband. But TW wants to present the dial-up service and the portal as "separate components so people can assess the ad growth and it looks like the Google model and the Yahoo! model."
Among TW's businesses, Parsons called movie and TV production "probably the most challenged in terms of revenue growth," partly because of the stellar record at the studio in recent years up through the latest "Harry Potter" that will be hard to beat, and partly because of a flattening DVD market.
"It's not flattened completely. We still see some growth, but not like we have in the past," he said.
He's upbeat about a new project to show old TV series from the Warner Bros. library on AOL. It's "an opportunity to mess around in that online space and find that right combination of content and availability," he said, predicting revenue streams "we can't put our finger on right now."
He also said Time Warner would look at MGM again if it came around at the right price. "Everything is a function of price. The reason we dropped out is that it became too high given our evaluation of cost and returns."
Reprising his stance on narrowing windows, Parsons said TW doesn't want to be confrontational but that windows will close and the company's "constantly in talks with all of our distributors to try to figure out how to effect this transition."
"So it's not confrontational, but we have our eye on the ball. We think we know this business pretty well, and we think you have to manage it in the trenches day to day," he said. "We don't want to go where no man's gone before and find we've imploded the current distribution system."
Time Warner is under siege by corporate raider Carl Icahn, who says management has been ineffective and failed to boost the stock. He's announced plans to try to unseat Parsons and other board members at TW's annual meeting in spring.
Time Warner shares fell 1.99% Thursday to close at $17.76.
