Comcast Buying G.E.\'s Stake in NBCUniversal for $16.7 Billion

Comcast said Tuesday that it has agreed to acquire General Electric’s remaining 49 percent stake in NBCUniversal for approximately $16.7 billion,
completing a sale process that was expected to take several more years.

The acquisition will wrap up by the end of March, Comcast said in a news release on Tuesday.

“This is an exciting day for Comcast as we have agreed to accelerate the purchase of NBCUniversal,” Comcast’s chief executive, Brian
Roberts, said in a statement. “The management team at GE has been a wonderful partner during the past two years and their support has been very valuable. Our decision to acquire GE’s ownership is driven by our sense of optimism for the future prospects of NBCUniversal and our desire to capture future value that we hope to create for our shareholders.”

Comcast took control of NBCUniversal in early 2011 by acquiring 51 percent of the media company from GE.

Don Johnson Settles \'Nash Bridges\' Lawsuit

In the seemingly perennial battle between producers of TV shows and the people who star in them, Don Johnson has notched a victory, quietly pocketing $19 million in a settlement with the company that produced his long-ago CBS crime series, “Nash Bridges.”

The agreement between Mr. Johnson and Rysher Entertainment was signed on Jan. 30 in Los Angeles, after years of legal wrangling over Mr. Johnson’s share in profits from syndication of the show, which ran on CBS from 1996 to 2001.

A jury awarded Mr. Johnson $50 million in profits and interest three years ago, but Rysher appealed to try to get the total reduced. In the end, Mr. Johnson agreed to a settlement of $15 million and interest. The court documents detailing the agreement were first reported on in The Hollywood Reporter.

Disputes have been common - and often ferocious â€" in the television business between the performers in series and the producers who own the syndication rights to the shows and continue to sell them for oten sizable profits.

James Garner, for example, sued Universal studio’s television arm for more than a decade to win profits from his hit series “The Rockford Files.” More recently, the late Jack Klugman won a settlement in 2012 after suing Universal for profits on his hit NBC show “Quincy.”

Slight Increase in Average Movie Ticket Price

LOS ANGELES â€" Moviegoers in the United States paid an average of $7.96 per ticket in 2012, a three-cent increase over the year before, according to the National Association of Theater Owners.

While ticket buyers generally bristle at price increases, the uptick was much smaller than in some previous years; from 2008 to 2010, for instance, theater owners raised prices by more than 4 percent annually.

The bad news: Price increases accelerated in the last part of the year. The average ticket price in the fourth quarter was $8.05. In the third quarter the average ticket price was $7.78.

One reason may be that theater owners, faced with declining interest for pricier 3-D offerings, are charging more for regular tickets.

Regal Entertainment, the nation’s largest movie theater chain, said last week that it raised prices for standard screenings by 3.3 percent in the fourth quarter; 3-D ticket sales in the period contributed 14 percent of Regal’s sales, down from 17 percent in the samequarter a year ago.

Netflix Joins With DreamWorks Animation to Create Series for Children

LOS ANGELES â€" Continuing a campaign to deepen its appeal with children, Netflix on Tuesday morning announced a partnership with DreamWorks Animation to create an original cartoon series.

The show, expected to make its debut on the streaming service in December, will be based on DreamWorks Animation’s coming movie “Turbo,” about a snail who gains the power of super speed. The Netflix spinoff will be called “Turbo: F.A.S.T.,” which stands for Fast Action Stunt Team.

Netflix is gambling that “Turbo” will be a hit when it arrives in theaters on July 19. Although DreamWorks Animation has high hopes for that movie, it’s still anyone’s guess how audiences will respond; the company’s last film, “Rise of the Guardians,” was a severe box office disappointment.

Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, said in a statement that DreamWorks Animation has “a long track record of creating incredibly successful characters.” DreamWorks Animation’s chief executive,Jeffrey Katzenberg, never shy about making a hard sell, called the partnership “part of the television revolution.”

The “Turbo” project comes as a rival streaming service, Amazon’s Prime Instant Video, races to prepare its own original series; Amazon has five children’s shows in development, for instance.

Netflix, which recently introduced the original series “House of Cards” to strong reviews from critics, has been working over the past several years to enhance its offerings for children. In 2011, it acquired the streaming rights to DreamWorks Animation’s movies and television specials. New films from Disney, Pixar and Marvel will move from Starz to Netflix in late 2016, following a deal the streaming company made with the Walt Disney Company in December.

Netflix said its members streamed more than 2 billion hours of children’s content in 2012, taking care to note that it is “always commercial free.”

The Breakfast Meeting: Amazon Challenges Netflix, and an Advertiser Turns to Cat Videos

Amazon.com is slowly building a library of streaming television shows and movies to rival that of Netflix, much to the satisfaction of media companies like Time Warner and CBS, Brian Stelter writes. Amazon will not unveil its own original shows until fall at the earliest, but it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to win exclusive Web rights on shows for its Amazon Prime streaming service, like “Downton Abbey” from PBS and “Falling Skies” from TNT. Amazon is a long way from matching Netflix in terms of TV and movie selection, but parts of the media business already see the company as Pepsi to Netflix’s Coke. Other companies, including Google, Sony, Intel and a new venture by Redbox and Verizon, are scrambling for a Snapple or Red Bull.

Watching cat videos online has become a euphemism for wasting time, even if one is not actually watching popular Web felines like < href="http://www.youtube.com/watchv=hPzNl6NKAG0">Maru or Henri. Advertisers have turned to the genre to sell Litter Genie, a cat-waste receptacle that neutralizes odors, Andrew Adam Newman reports. The third in a series of irreverent music videos promoting the brand has been released on YouTube (the first two videos have over 1 million views apiece.) A gray tabby named Walter is featured in all three videos and a television spot for Litter Genie.

The plot of the television show “Made in Japan” echoes the very real ! economic angst of that nation, Hiroko Tabuchi explains. The three-part series, broadcast on NHK, focuses on Takumi Electronics, a fictional company whose lead in television and mobile phones has been eclipsed by more nimble upstarts in China and South Korea. So Takumi Electronics turned to manufacturing more efficient lithium-ion batteries, like the actual company GS Yuasa, which made the batteries that have grounded Boeing’s Dreamliner. The show ends with Takumi Electronics teaming up with a Chinese competitor to build safer batteries. The issues with the Dreamliner have yet to be resolved.

ABC won the rights to the first on-camera interview with Amanda Knox, an American college student who was convicted of murdering her housemate in Italy while studying abroad in 2009; the convictionwas overturned in 2011. The interview will be conducted by Diane Sawyer, the anchor of ABC’s “World News,” and will air during prime time on April 30, Brian Stelter writes. Ms. Knox’s case attracted a great deal of news coverage because of lurid sexual details attached to the case coupled with her appearance as an attractive girl next door. The interview will coincide with the release of Ms. Knox’s book, “Waiting to be Heard,” published by HarperCollins.

Univision and ABC News are both backing a new channel called Fusion that will target English-speaking Latinos in the United States, Amy Chozick reports. The channel will premiere this summer and will test whether second-generation Latinos want to watch television created s! pecifical! ly for them. But creating a 24-hour cable channel for a relatively narrow audience with many options in English and Spanish is a risky proposition â€" studies show that English-speaking Latinos tend to watch the same programs as non-Hispanics.