Peter Kafka

The media landscape used to be straightforward: Content companies (studios) — made stuff (TV shows and movies) and sold it to pay TV distributors, who sold it to consumers. Now things are up for grabs: Netflix buys stuff from the studios, but it’s making its own stuff, too, and it’s selling it directly to consumers. That’s one of the reasons older media companies are trying to compete by consolidating. Disney, for example, recently completed its purchase of 21st Century Fox. Distributors like AT&T, which bought Time Warner, are becoming media companies, too.

Comcast plans to outbid Disney for Fox’s movie and TV studios, its cable networks and its stake in Hulu, as Comcast announced today it’s in “advanced stages of preparing an offer.” Murdoch, who heads Fox, already turned down a proposal from Comcast late last year in favor of Disney, despite Comcast’s bid that was 16 percent higher.  Now that it’s out in the open, a bidding war is sure to ensue, and Comcast and Disney will offer their respective spins. Here’s what to expect:

Google and Facebook aren’t just incredibly profitable tech companies — they are “public goods” with a responsibility to serve the public, says former President Barack Obama. “I do think the large platforms — Google and Facebook being the most obvious, Twitter and others as well, are part of that ecosystem — have to have a conversation about their business model that recognizes they are a public good as well as a commercial enterprise,” the former president said at MIT’s Sloan Sports Conference. “They’re not just an invisible platform, they’re shaping our culture in powerful ways.”

Comcast used to be the biggest cable TV company in the US. And it still is. But now it’s something more important: It’s the biggest broadband company in the US. The company announced it has 22.5 million TV subscribers and 25.1 million broadband subscribers. That puts it a couple million subscribers ahead of Charter, its nearest competitor for internet access, and well ahead of everyone else.

In January, we reached out to BuzzFeed in the wake of the dossier to find out whether the company felt it would be putting itself at risk — legal and financial — by publishing such materials. Recently, Aleksef Gubarev, the Russian-born chief executive of tech firm XBT, sued BuzzFeed for defamation.

Though Gubarev’s lawyer insists that his client is in no way tied to the president’s administration and the suit is not political, it does pose a major question for BuzzFeed: What are the potential repercussions of its aggressive approach to journalism, which pushes beyond some of its more traditional competitors? And in the Trump era, how should it balance the risk and reward of hard-hitting journalism at a company that makes most of its money on light-hearted entertainment?

Facebook wants to show more advertisements to people who watch its videos and start making money for the people who supply it with those videos. Industry sources say the social network is going to start testing a new “mid-roll” ad format, which will give video publishers the chance to insert ads into their clips after people have watched them for at least 20 seconds. For now, Facebook will sell the ads and share the revenue with publishers, giving them 55 percent of all sales. That’s the same split offered by YouTube, which dominates the online video ad business. If the new ads take off, they could represent the first chance many video publishers have had to make real money from the stuff they’ve been running on Facebook.

How much would you pay to read lots of stories, from lots of digital publishers, without having to look at many ads? Tony Haile wants to find out. Haile is the former CEO of Chartbeat, the real-time analytics software used by most of the digital publishing world. Now he’s at work on a new company: Scroll, a startup that wants to roll up a selection of stories from a wide variety of publishers and sell monthly subscriptions.

The big selling point for readers: Haile says they’ll have a better experience than the one they have now, when they read web pages clogged with crummy ads. The big selling point for publishers Haile wants to recruit: He says they’ll make more money sharing subscription revenue with him than they do with those crummy ads. Scroll is a bit difficult to describe, in part because it seems to combine elements of things people have already tried. And in part because Haile hasn’t put it together yet. He has raised $3 million from investors including SoftTech, OATV, Axel Springer, News Corp and the New York Times. And he’s currently out pitching publishers to sign up. It won’t launch until 2017. But let’s try walking through it: Haile wants to create a subscription service that gives readers an ad-free, or nearly ad-free, reading experience for stories from a wide variety of publishers.

When AT&T owns Time Warner, nothing will change; AT&T will treat Time Warner like a standalone company. When AT&T owns Time Warner, AT&T will offer Time Warner stuff to its customers that they can’t get anywhere else. Which version of that is true? Both versions! Just depends on who AT&T execs are trying to convince, as they look for government regulators and Wall Street to bless their $86 billion deal.

The regulator part is the really hard hurdle: Washington seems to be increasingly skeptical about mega deals like this — which is why it nixed Comcast-Time Warner Cable — and so AT&T has to convince officials that it won’t make it harder for people who don’t have AT&T to get “Game of Thrones” or the next Batman movie, or CNN. AT&T has common sense on its side when it makes this argument, since if it limits access to Khaleesi or Batman or Wolf Blitzer, or provides special access to them, all of those things become less valuable for Comcast customers or Verizon customers or anyone who doesn’t get AT&T. And even if AT&T wanted to do that, there’s zero chance regulators will let it happen. It’s a non-starter.

More than 16 years ago, AOL bought Time Warner for $160 billion, in a deal that is now commonly cited as the worst merger in history. Now AT&T wants to buy Time Warner. What the hell is it thinking? The Wall Street Journal thinks the deal could close within days, so we may hear a rationale from AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson shortly. In the meantime, here are some educated guesses about why he thinks the deal is worth doing:

• AT&T doesn’t want to be a dumb pipe — or at least, not just a dumb pipe.
• AT&T knows DirecTV is a shrinking business.
• This deal makes more sense than taking on Google and Facebook
• AT&T isn’t AOL. Neither is Time Warner.

Silicon Valley has signed petitions against Donald Trump. It is also writing checks and telling employees that it’s important to vote. But so far the brightest minds in tech haven’t deployed much in the way of ... tech to defeat the Republican nominee. Amit Kumar says he wants to try, with a mobile app designed to rally votes against Trump where it matters: In swing states.

Kumar is CEO of Trimian, a sort-of-stealth company that is building networking apps for groups like college alumni. But in August he built #NeverTrump, an app that’s supposed to tell mobile users about people they know in battleground states, so they can reach out to them and ask them to vote. If you want, #NeverTrump will do the asking, too, with pre-programmed messages it will send up to four times before the election. It’s an explicit acknowledgement that Silicon Valley workers’ votes won’t have any impact on the electoral college, since California is already a lock for Hillary Clinton.