Time Warner dispels NBC rumor

CEO Jeff Bewkes denies network acquisition

By JILL GOLDSMITH

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said Monday the media giant has "no agenda" regarding the acquisition of a television network, despite renewed speculation over a possible hook-up with NBC Universal.

"All of us are wondering what will happen to the networks," Bewkes said at a media conference in Gotham. As for NBC, "We'd have a look at that if and when it came up."

A recent item in Newsweek said TW and NBC Universal parent General Electric have begun preliminary efforts to explore a commingling of their entertainment assets.

Bewkes said Warner Bros., a TV production powerhouse, finds it a lucrative business to be the second provider of programming to the four main television networks, all of which are attached to their own studios. "They can't really do it all themselves," he said at the Deutsche Bank Media & Telecommunications Conference.

Time Warner recently announced plans to sell off its cable operations, and Bewkes reiterated Monday that more big moves are on the table, including a possible spinoff of Time Inc. and a transaction involving AOL.

In publishing, he said entertainment and lifestyle titles like People, In Style and Real Simple are performing well, but news and finance continue to lag in the current economic downturn. He cautioned investors against lumping magazines in with newspapers, which have had wrenching years of declining readership and advertising revenue.

Newspapers "are local, they have classifieds, they have an older demo reading them. Magazines are national, they are branded, and in many cases have a younger audience," Bewkes said.

On the digital front, Bewkes noted heightened interest in AOL "by the usual suspects" over the past six months and indicated there's a good chance the company could be spun off or combined with another in the not too distant future.

He also defended, sort of, TW's $850 million cash purchase of the social networking site Bebo earlier this year -- a move some Wall Streeters have questioned.

"We did make a bit of a stretch," he said. But he pointed out that News Corp.'s acquisition of MySpace also stymied investors for the first year, while now it's applauded.

In both magazines and online, TW is polishing and streamlining to make each business as attractive as possible to potential investors.

At the company's core are Warner Bros. and the powerful group of cable nets led by HBO, TNT, TBS and Cartoon Network. At the studio, Bewkes sees the significant cost savings from disbanding New Line, and from making fewer movies than it has in the past, as key in maintaining profits going forward.

"We've got this strategy to only make hits, and that's our plan," he joked. (He acknowledged occasional misses like "Speed Racer.")

As for advertising, he said the company is in the middle of the cable upfront now and "we feel very good about it. I will generally say we think we'll be at the high end of all cable networks ... and we think that will carry through in a good balance between scatter and upfront."

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