OPINION: Making the connection
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 7/3/2008
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The news didn’t exactly come as a surprise. Never popular with investors, the deal was pretty clearly doomed after Circuit City reported train-wreck first-quarter results last month, indicating serious, ongoing operational problems at the chain and making it poison to any strategic buyer (Circuit City’s best hope for a buyer now would be a private equity group looking for distressed assets).
Yet I couldn’t help being struck by a number of nearly concurrent events that could be read as bolstering the underlying strategic logic of combining the retailing of entertainment devices and content.
Just days before Blockbuster withdrew its bid, Sony Corp. chairman/CEO Howard Stringer unveiled a broad new corporate strategy centered on network-enabled entertainment devices and digital delivery of content.
According to Stringer, 90% of Sony entertainment devices will be network-enabled by 2011, with TV sets leading the way.
Read the full column at ContentAgenda.com.
