“A top Apple executive raised the prospect of the iPhone maker buying Time Warner at a meeting with the owner of HBO, CNN and Warner Brothers, according to three people who were briefed on it,” Matthew Garrahan and James Fontanella-Khan report for The Financial Times.
“Eddy Cue, who oversees critical Apple businesses such as the iTunes store, Apple Music and iCloud, broached the idea of a bid at a meeting at the end of last year with Olaf Olafsson, Time Warner’s head of corporate strategy, the people said,” Garrahan and Fontanella-Khan report. “Discussions about Apple buying Time Warner did not get beyond a preliminary stage and never included Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, nor his Time Warner counterpart, Jeff Bewkes, people familiar with the matter said.”
“Apple intends to ramp up its spending on original content to ‘several hundred million dollars a year,’ according to people familiar with the matter. It has also not ruled out acquiring a media company, a person close to Apple told the Financial Times.,” Garrahan and Fontanella-Khan report. “Time Warner would be an obvious fit… [with] highly sought-after assets: HBO, which produces Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley and Veep; Warner Bros, Hollywood’s largest producer of films and television shows; and Turner, which owns several cable channels and holds the rights to NBA basketball.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What we wrote of Apple’s burgeoning cash pile over three years ago:
Maybe it’s insurance in the face of recalcitrant content providers (“last chance: sign the deal or we’ll buy you with petty cash”)? — MacDailyNews, February 21, 2013
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Apple should use their cash pile to create some much needed leverage to finally get their Apple TV subscription bundle(s) up and running even if all they do is flash their cash around. — MacDailyNews, January 14, 2016
SEE ALSO:
Obviously, Apple could buy Time Warner, but they shouldn’t – January 14, 2016
Apple eyeing Time Warner assets to ease launch of a stand-alone streaming TV service – January 13, 2016