If you’ve ever listened to Time Warner chief executive Jeffrey Bewkes speak, you’ll be used to his breezy, languid style. But he sounded even more so than usual on Friday at a conference in Washington D.C.  when asked about the big media story of the year so far: Comcast’s bid to take control of NBC Universal.

Comcast’s bid, led by CEO Brian Roberts, is exactly the opposite of what Bewkes has been doing at Time Warner, where rather than buying he’s spun off the cable assets and hopes to do the same with AOL by the end of this year.  So Bewkes couldn’t resist a little jab at his rival and sometimes partner:

“I don’t want to say anything that would discourage Brian from continuing in this pursuit that he has,” Bewkes said to laughter from the audience.

Bewkes agreed with suggestions that Comcast might be doing this for a share in the growing cable business. 

“They may have concerns about their future in cable and they may want to hedge into what they think is a better long-term business, which is the branded content business. It’s a good business, it’s one that everybody should want to get in. We’re in it, we’re very nicely placed in it.”

But the executive who lived through one of the worst corporate mergers of all time — AOL-Time Warner — is far less supportive of the idea of big combinations, especially in the media space.

“It’s probably true if you look at media deals — not just ours – in the entire industry. In the last 10 or 15 years there’s a lower percentage of deals that have delievered what they said they were going to deliver and have had an actual return on investment versus  what you would find in other more rationally based businesses where you don’t call the CEO ‘a mogul’. So whoever that is doesn’t get lost thinking about what they’re going to write in tomorrow’s paper.”

And while many journalists, investors and Wall Street analysts continue to try to decide whether this deal makes sense, Bewkes has a simple test.

 ”If it’s a synergy idea that takes a week and nine articles to fully plumb the mysterious depths, you’re probably wrong.”

Nice to know someone feels our pain.  

Allen & Co might have thought they were being helpful to executives by shutting out the working press from the usual mingling with the executives at the Sun Valley Lodge bar. Its annual media and technology conference includes the reminder to its attendees that they’re not supposed to talk to the reporters who fly out, uninvited but not unwelcome, to try to get the big guys to talk

Maybe it wasn’t so helpful. At least four CEOs told MediaFile and other reporters privately here that they were less than impressed with the decision. Executives who wanted to speak with individual reporters or hold court with several at a time had to do it outside the bar. And that’s just what many of them did, opting to hang with each other and various journalists in the lobby outside the bar, leaving the wonderful staff of the lodge’s bar to ferry drinks out to the crowd.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt held his annual sit down with reporters on Thursday by the fireplace in the lobby of the Sun Valley Inn, and a bunch of other top movers in the media world from Hearst Magazines chief Cathleen Black to News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and Time Warner Inc CEO Jeff Bewkes seemed to think little ill of jawing with the press during cocktail hour.

The hired security at the event said Allen & Co made the decision on Tuesday after someone complained. The decision reversed years of tradition here where the press and executives mingle in the evenings to have off-the-record chats and trade gossip.

On Saturday, the last day with just one (MediaFile) reporter left, the security seemed to relax a little. The head of security told this reporter, “I’m letting you get away with murder because you’re the last guy here.”

Let’s see if we can apply that policy to the bar next year. Everyone can use a little social lubricant, especially executives and the reporters who make their living off covering what they do.

AOL’s recently appointed chief executive, Tim Armstrong, has only been in place for three weeks but Wall Street is waiting impatiently for his next move. He’s started to shake up the ad team. Investors are focused on when parent company Time Warner will spin off the Internet unit, which has lost favor with Wall Street, advertisers and users alike.

Armstrong, gave his first interview since starting on April 1 to Ad Age Editor Jonah Bloom at the 4A’s advertising conference in San Francisco. Though he has declined doing interviews since he joined, AOL’s communications people said Armstrong was keeping a commitment he’d made while he still at Google.

The three-part interview can be seen at Ad Age here. The fireside chat covered topics like AOL’s branding, AOL’s undervalued ad space, and how Armstrong had to leave Google by the tradesman’s entrance on his last day.

Asked whether AOL’s standalone valuation could once again be worth $20 billion, which it theoretically was until Google wrote down its 5 percent stake in AOL to effectively give it a value of $5.5 billion in January, Armstrong said:

5.5 (billion) in my book is still a lot of money…I’ve said internally to employees Wall Street cares about you, and Main Street cares about you, and until we get Main Street caring about our company everyday (and) every time they touch the product and service, the valuation doesn’t matter because the worst case possible, the thing that happens at Internet companies is, you see, it is that people vote with their clicks and over time unique users go down.

At AOL, one of the things we’re focused on right now is how do you actually turn the unique users around and go in the right direction. More than valuation, more than anything else, if people are voting with clicks about our products and services, that will mean a lot more in the future of the company than the valuation.

Of course, Armstrong recognizes $5.5 billion is a lot of money because many Wall Street analysts now value AOL at between $2 billion to $3.5 billion. The analysts base their valuations on estimates of the terminally declining discounted cash flows from its dial-up business, along with estimates of cash flow from the struggling online advertising sales.

Collins Stewart’s Thomas Eagan says based on Wall Street’s average Time Warner valuation, AOL is even lower than that.

With recent events, we believe a transaction that will better monetize TWX’s value in AOL is approaching. That said, we continue to believe that the Street’s value of AOL, implied by the value of Time Warner stock, is too low. We estimate that the Street values AOL at approximately $1.6bn, less than half of its real value.

We’re sure Armstrong, who was brought in by Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes to oversee the likely spinning off of AOL, will agree his company is undervalued.

(Photo: Reuters)

One day soon you’ll be able to watch your TV everywhere: online, on-the-go, your phones, just about everywhere and Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes wants you to know about it and believe it.

Bewkes, perhaps relieved to talk about something other than how best to get rid of AOL , took the opportunity on Time Warner’s first quarter earnings call to share more of his vision for how he plans to free your favorite TV shows from the shackles of the cathode ray tube box (yes, some of us still own those).

The way Bewkes sees it if you’re already subscribing to a TV channel at home, you should be able to watch it for free on broadband from any provider, wherever and whenever you want.

As he told analysts on Wednesday:

Over 90% of U.S. households already paying for television, programmers will be able to give consumers even more for their money. There’s a tremendous level of interest in TV Everywhere across the industry, and we’re working with several distributors on a trial slated for the second half this year.

But Bewkes was light on the details, such as how you overcome the technical challenge of “authenticating” subscribers’ access to programming when they might take video from one company; Internet from another and wireless connection from a third provider. Bewkes told analysts:

It seems pretty simple from the network’s point of view, it’s also pretty clear any channel network that’s got dual revenue streams has clearly got a benefit in making that channel and brand loyalty move across any platform or device because if I just speak for our company, it’s good for TNT or HBO that if you’ve got it in your home you can watch it out of your home and on (video on demand), and that we can then maintain the subscription payment you’re already making and the ad sales cross platform ability that’s in the media.

What seems to be simple is the principle, say most analysts, but execution may be another thing. Sanford Bernstein Michael Nathanson thinks Bewkes is probably looking at the bigger picture. Sometimes saying the right things can almost be as important as execution, said Nathanson.

I think what Time Warner is talking about in trying to examine what these digital models are and trying to ensure there is no value destruction is the right thing. Even if it doesn’t amount to anything I still think there’s value in trying to educate the market and some of its competitors about they should approach it.

(Photo: Reuters)

Current valuations for media companies must have opened up some opportunities for dealmaking, right? It’s hard to argue that things aren’t getting cheap.

Well, two of the industry’s top dogs, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman and Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, seem to have differing views on whether the media meltdown makes for a good time to wheel and deal. Both were asked about it during presentations at the Deutsche Bank Annual Media & Telecommunications Conference.

Dauman said Viacom, owner of MTV and Paramount, wants to focus on internal growth, mentioning Nickelodeon’s international expansion and the Colors television channel in India. “I continue to believe that we are better off investing in growing our own brands than spending significant money on acquisitions,” he said “I don’t see our using huge dollars to make an acquisition anytime soon.”

Bewkes left the door slightly more ajar. He said a lot of the assets or companies out there — “you can fill in the usual suspects” — have previously been way overpriced. “Up ’til now, those things have been around at prices that just don’t provide a return,” he said.

Deals may now make more sense. “We have room for acquisitions if there are real opportunities out there that don’t represent stupid prices or acquisitions risks,” he said when asked if they were on the prowl.

Time Warner, of course, knows a thing of two about stupid prices and acquisition risks.

Speaking of which… Not surprisingly, Bewkes was asked about AOL. He provided fairly stock answers, saying he was disappointed in ad sales and would still consider a deal for the troubled web business. “We always remain open for scale combinations that put any of our businesses in a better position,” he said. “We remain open to that.”

(Photo: Reuters)

U.S. shoppers are still spending in a big way — they are just not buying cars, plane tickets, clothing, etc. But they are buying video games.

While most media segments try to maintain stability during today’s economic turmoil, the video game industry keeps on growing, with U.S. video game hardware and software sales up 10 percent last month according to NPD, fueled by record sales of Nintendo’s Wii console and DS hand-held system.

Nintendo’s Wii console sold over 2 million units in November, up from over 800,000 in the previous month.

A separate reports suggests that hard times may favor video games, adults will “turn to
staying in with video games rather than going out on the spend.”

(Reuters)

Keep an eye on:

• DreamWorks Animation launches characters like Shrek and the penguins from “Madagascar” into new lines of business, hoping to grow consistently even during a recession that already is slowing DVD sales. (Los Angeles Times)
• Time Warner names CEO Jeff Bewkes as chairman; Richard Parsons to step down on Dec. 31 (PaidContent)
• CBS Interactive reorganization details (PaidContent)
• Howard Stern contemplates re-signing with Sirius XM (Orbitcast)

(Photo: Reuters)

Yahoo: Shun me once, shame on you. Shun me three times in one day, shame on… uh, shame on all of you.

First, Google walked away from their search advertising partnership, saying that it had enough with interference from U.S. antitrust regulators. That’s no surprise — remember the deal was originally conceived as a way for Yahoo to fend off Microsoft’s takeover ambitions? On that score, Google can certainly say: mission accomplished.

Then, investors and bloggers started speculating that Google’s withdrawal could make room for Microsoft to return to the negotiating table. Shares of Yahoo jumped as much as 11 percent on rumors that the companies were in advanced talks … before several people familiar with the situation roundly denied that Microsoft was close to making an offer.

Finally, when News Corp was asked on its earnings call about the status of its previously reported discussions with Yahoo or Microsoft, Rupert Murdoch said, “There are no talks.”

That seems to leave Yahoo with only one possible partner: Time Warner’s AOL. The two companies are supposed to be in due diligence on a combination, but when questioned on its earnings call, Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes was vague:

You know all of the usual suspects and things that go on, including even some breaking news today, in some of our competitors. So the opportunities or possibilities remain open for this whole business to restructure itself, and to build adequate scale to compete with whoever is in the lead position and I think we have all seen the interest at both, just to mention a few companies, Microsoft, Yahoo and even Google, to bulk up and increase scale. And we’re no different in that regard. So beyond that, we can’t really say what is possible, or what is under way.

In other words, guess again.

(Reuters photo: Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang talks to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at 26th annual Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, July 10, 2008)