Current TV Considers Putting Itself Up for Sale

Current TV, a low-rated cable channel that recently reinvented itself with a lineup of political talk shows, is considering selling itself, the channel's chief executive, Joel Hyatt, said on Friday.

A sale could be an out for Mr. Hyatt and Al Gore, who bought the small cable news channel Newsworld International in 2004 and turned it into Current TV a year later. They could opt instead for a strategic partnership with a major media company or for a new round of venture capital financing. Mr. Hyatt declined an interview request on Friday.

What may entice buyers isn't Current's built-in audience, but the real estate: it is one of the few channels with a big footprint (it's available in about 60 million homes in the United States) but without a big media owner. The channel's stakeholders, along with Mr. Hyatt and Mr. Gore, include Comcast, Direct TV and several venture capital firms.

Mr. Hyatt said in a statement, “Current has been approached many times by media companies interested in acquiring our company. This year alone, we have had three inquiries. As a consequence, we thought it might be useful to engage expertise to help us evaluate our strategic options.”

Mr. Hyatt's comments were first reported by The New York Post. Later, Reuters reported that JP Morgan Chase and the Raine Group had been hired to assess the channel's options. In 2008, Current filed for a $100 million initial public stock offering but scrapped the plan a year later.

Originally programmed with short-form videos submitted by viewers, the channel changed direction in 2011 by hiring the MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann and by adding a number of like-minded liberal news shows. The ratings have ticked up a bit since then, but not in a way that makes Current a rival of MSNBC or CNN.

This year Current fired Mr. Olbermann, and he sued the company, accusing it of breach of contract; the lawsuit is pending. The channel replaced him with Eliot Spi tzer. The other nightly hosts are Joy Behar, Cenk Uygur and Jennifer Granholm. Mr. Gore has hosted special election coverage this year, most recently during the presidential debates.

Navigating the Medicare Claims Process

In this weekend's Your Money column, I write about the settlement of a class-action lawsuit over the question of whether and when Medicare should cover treatments for people with chronic or degenerative conditions for which there are no cure.

If you or a relative has multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease or if you're paralyzed or recovering from a stroke, among other things, you too may have been unable to get Medicare to cover physical therapy or certain skilled nursing treatment because your health wasn't improving or you weren't likely to improve any more. The settlement clarifies what was supposed to be the law of the land, which is that Medicare ought to cover any reasonable treatment prescribed by a doctor even if it only aims to slow a person's deterioration or maintain the current level of health.

Have you run into a situation where Medicare turned you, a relative or a patient down for treatment because there was no likelihood of improv ement? If so, did you appeal the decision?

Home Entertainment Spending Rises, Buoyed by Streaming Subscriptions

LOS ANGELES - Consumer spending on movies and television in-home entertainment formats nudged up a quarter of a percent to about $3.94 billion in the third quarter, from about $3.93 billion in the period a year earlier, according to the Digital Entertainment Group. For the year to date, spending was $12.34 billion, up about 1 percent from $12.22 billion for the same period in 2011.

The slight increase came as revenue from the subscription streaming of programming rose sharply, to about $579 million in the third quarter, up from about $255 million in the quarter a year ago, and revenue from both video-on-demand and the electronic sale of digital programming rose.

Those increases offset continuing declines in the sale of DVDs and the rental of programming in disc format in stores and by subscription.

Revenue from the rental of discs at kiosks rose about 10 percent in the third quarter, to $455 million from $414 million in the period a year earlier.

Michael Cieply covers the film industry from the Los Angeles bureau.

Claims on a Fortune

Paul Sullivan's Wealth Matters column this week looks at the issue of whether Lance Armstrong should be concerned about keeping his wealth in the wake of the report from the United States Anti-Doping Agency detailing his use of performance-enhancing drugs to win cycling races. And the independent advisers and lawyers Paul spoke to answered that Mr. Armstrong will probably remain a rich man. Yes, he'll probably have to forfeit his Tour de France prize money and his sponsors have dropped him, but much of his wealth is probably protected, these experts said.

Mr. Armstrong is not the first high-profile athlete to fall from grace. But while he may be legally able to protect the millions he earned from his sponsorships, is that the right outcome? Perhaps it's too late to affect Mr. Armstrong's case, but should the rules be changed so that when questions come up in the future about the on-field accomplishments of other athletes, they would not be allowed to hold onto their fortunes?

What do you think is the right thing to do?

Olympics and Asset Sales Help Lift Comcast Profits

Aided by the sale of assets and a lift from the Summer Olympics, Comcast reported strong third-quarter growth on Friday, surpassing expectations on several crucial measures.

The nation's largest cable company said its net income rose to $2.11 billion, or 78 cents a share, compared with $908 million, or 33 cents a share, in the same quarter last year. Most of the increase was attributed to the sale of wireless spectrum to Verizon and the sale of its 15.8 percent stake in A&E Television Networks. Excluding the sales, net income was $1.25 billion, or 46 cents a share, in line with analysts' estimates.

The company's overall revenues rose to $16.5 billion, beating estimates. Its core cable business lost 117,000 of 22 million video subscribers, a bit fewer than the loss forecast by analysts - and more importantly, 29 percent fewer than were lost during the same quarter last year. Meanwhile, its broadband business gained 287,000 subscribers, topping 19 million for the first time, a bit more than forecast.

Most importantly for Comcast, its average video subscriber paid more than ever for its services, topping $150 a month for the first time - more than offsetting the slight decline in total subscribers. Total revenues for video, broadband, business services and the rest of the Cable Communications business totaled at $9.97 billion, up from $9.33 billion in the same quarter last year.

Comcast's other business, NBCUniversal, which it took over last year, also posted gains in the third quarter, thanks in part to the broadcast of the Summer Olympics in July and August. So much for a projected $200 million loss on the Olylmpics; in the third quarter the company reported $120 million in profits from the Games, due in part to higher-than-expected television ratings. Overall, when other revenues and expenses are added up, NBC will break even on its coverage, Comcast's chief financial officer, Michael Ange lakis, said Friday.

The Olympics lifted NBCUniversal's broadcast television segment to a $88 million profit of the quarter; without the Games, broadcast would have reported a $32 million loss, somewhat worse than the $7 million loss in the same quarter last year. Comcast's earnings release cited two reasons for that: “higher programming costs” because NBC started some of its fall shows earlier than usual, and expenses tied to news coverage of the presidential election.

Brian Roberts, Comcast's chief executive, told investors on a conference call Friday morning that NBC was “off to a very strong start in this prime time season.” The network has been winning in the advertiser-friendly demographic of adults 18 to 49 for seven weeks.

“It's certainly early, but I believe and hope we are seeing the beginning of a turnaround at NBC,” Mr. Roberts added.

Including $1.2 billion in Olympics revenue, NBCUniversal as a whole posted $6.8 billion in reve nue, up from $5.2 billion in the same quarter last year. The cable networks segment, an umbrella for channels like Bravo and E!, showed no advertising revenue growth in the quarter, but showed slight growth overall thanks to higher per-channel subscriber fees. The film segment showed a 24 percent revenue gain, to $1.4 billion, thanks to successful theatrical releases like “Ted” and “The Bourne Legacy.”

The Breakfast Meeting: China Blocks Times\'s Sites, and Faulkner v. Allen

The Chinese government blocked access on Friday to both the Chinese-language and English-language Web sites of The New York Times after the newspaper published an account of the fortune accumulated by the family of the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, Keith Bradsher reported. In addition, the popular mini-blogging service in China, Sina Weibo, was blocking attempts to mention The Times or Mr. Wen. The article, which traced the large investment stakes of Mr. Wen's family members, including Mr. Wen's 90-year-old mother, runs counter to his public image as a humble leader from a poor family.

• Since Bloomberg published an article this summer about the wealth accumulated by Mr. Wen's expected successor as China's top leader, Vice President Xi Jinping, the news service has encountered a series of problems in mainland China, including the blocking of its Web site, which is in English, Mr. Bradsher wrote.
• The BBC quoted a spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry as desc ribing The Times article as a smear of China written with “ulterior motives.” The BBC article noted how some users of the Twitter-like Sina Weibo have tried to circumvent the censors by using homonyms and coded language:

“The Twist Your Waist Times says the best actor has $2.7bn of assets. I just wonder how will he spend it?” asked a Tencent Weibo user registered in the British West Indies territory of the Turks and Caicos Islands.
“Twist your waist” in Chinese characters sounds like New York when spoken, while “best actor” refers to Mr Wen, who critics say only pretends to be a people-first leader.

The presidential election is on track to be a $2 billion campaign, based on the latest financial disclosures from the Obama and Romney teams, Nicholas Confessore and Jo Craven McGinty report.

• The Hollywood Reporter writes that including what was collected Thursday night from a fund-raiser featuring Michel le Obama at the home of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, Hollywood has raised $13 million for President Obama in October alone.
• The casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife donated $10 million this month to a “super PAC” supporting Mitt Romney, Nicholas Confessore reports.

Apple released its latest quarterly results - for the period ending Sept. 29 - and they largely met analysts' expectations, Nick Wingfield reported. The results showed how Apple's business has been shaped by mobile products; revenue from the iPhone rose 56 percent to $17.13 billion, representing nearly half of the company's total revenue. It sold 26.9 million iPhones, 58 percent more than a year earlier. The totals for the quarter were impressive - in line with a company with a market value of $570 billion: net income was $8.22 billion, up 24 percent; revenue was $35.97 billion. Revenue for the full fiscal year was $156.5 billion, Mr. Wingfield writes, exceeding that of Microsoft , Google and Facebook combined.

• The shadow cast by Apple is perhaps nowhere more clear than in the case of the streaming-music service Pandora, Ben Sisario writes. When Apple's product announcements on Tuesday did not include any mention of an Internet radio service, which would compete with Pandora, Pandora's stock rose more than 8 percent. On Thursday, however, Pandora's stock fell as much as 20 percent on a Bloomberg News report that Apple would be introducing such a service in 2013. (The stock rose to close the day down 11.7 percent for the day, gaining more in after-hours trading.)

“The past is not dead; it's not even past.” Just ask the estate of a famous writer. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the owners of the rights to the literary works of the late William Faulkner are suing over the use of that quote in Woody Allen's movie “Midnight in Paris” - spoken by Owen Wilson - as copyright infringement.

Noam C ohen edits and writes for the Media Decoder blog. Follow @noamcohen on Twitter.

Friday Reading: How Extended Doctor Office Hours Save Money

A variety of consumer-focused articles appears daily in The New York Times and on our blogs. Each weekday morning, we gather them together here so you can quickly scan the news that could hit you in your wallet.

• Death of boy prompts new medical efforts nationwide. (N.Y./Region)
• In crash safety campaign, a collision of humanity. (Wheel)
• Getting more out of your smart phone. (Bits)
• A Windows 8 cheat sheet. (Pogue's Posts)
• How extended doctor office hours save money. (Well)
• Why women can't do pull ups. (Well)
• Time to make the Halloween costumes (or not).
• A revolving door to avoid at the end of life. (The New Old Age)
• Answers to questions about the SAT and ACT, part five. (The Choice)
• Why am I still on crutches? (Booming)
• Re-living the Shackleton expedition, for $20,000. (In Transit)