Thursday, August 9, 2007

Equity Firm Invests in NBC Universal-News Corp. Online Venture

By BRAD STONE

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 8 — The joint venture between NBC Universal and the News Corporation to bring their television shows and movies onto the Internet still lacks a Web site. It still has no name. It also has yet to announce a clear mission that persuades the large number of skeptical observers that real-world rivals can cooperate online.

But the company, still known only by the working name of “New Site,” now has some deeper pockets. Providence Equity Partners, a media investment firm based in Rhode Island, has invested $100 million for a 10 percent stake in the joint venture, people with knowledge of the deal said.

The investment will allow the companies to accelerate the introduction of their service and the transfer of NBC and Fox films and television shows into Internet-friendly video formats. Adding Providence as a partner also spreads the financial risk of the networks and will no doubt make the venture more palatable to the boards at General Electric and the News Corporation, which, respectively, own NBC and Fox.

Providence is led by Jonathan M. Nelson, who sits on the boards of MGM, Warner Music Group and the Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network. He has a long history of investing in media properties like local newspapers, television stations and cable networks.

More recently, Providence has invested in new media venture like NexTag, an online comparison shopping site, and WhitePages.com.

Providence Equity Partners and the News Corporation declined to comment on the deal, which sets a value on the joint venture of $1 billion.

Todd Dagres, general partner at Spark Capital, a media and entertainment-focused venture capital firm, said it was a startlingly rich valuation for a company that could most likely not be sold or go public, considering NBC and the News Corporation hold large stakes. “It’s a sign of the times when a company that didn’t exist a couple months ago can raise this kind of money,” he said.

The joint venture between NBC and the News Corporation was announced in March, six months after Google purchased the Internet phenomenon YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. Though NBC and News Corporation executives have said the venture is not a direct rival to YouTube, they have had complex and testy relations with the popular video site over the posting of their copyrighted material without their permission.

Viacom, which held discussions on joining the venture but has decided against it, is suing YouTube for $1 billion on the ground of copyright infringement.

Executives at NBC and the News Corporation have said that New Site would accept user-generated content but would primarily serve as a way to show their collective libraries of film and television shows in a protected, high-quality format.

The venture will also put their content in front of people in a variety of places online. In addition to putting the video on its own site, the venture has syndication agreements with the News Corporation’s MySpace social networking site, Yahoo, Microsoft’s MSN and Time Warner’s AOL.

The sizable investment from Providence Equity Partners may not quell doubts that the two big media companies will get along. Ventures where decision-making is split between two parties with diverging agendas often struggle, and the News Corporation and NBC Universal doggedly compete on TV and in theaters.

Roger McNamee, a partner at private equity firm Elevation Partners, said there were few examples in business history where joint ventures succeeded. “The simple question is, are they organizing for success?” he said.

It remains unclear how much autonomy the joint venture will have and to what extent it will have to answer to its media parents.

The companies have said the venture would begin this autumn. The service will let users watch television shows like “Heroes,” “24,” “Saturday Night Live,” and “The Simpsons” as well as movies like “Live Free or Die Hard” and “The Bourne Ultimatum.”

Both companies already make some of that content freely available on their own Web sites and have put it up for sale on Apple’s download service, iTunes.

The joint venture recently leased office space in Los Angeles and hired a chief executive, Jason Kilar, a former Amazon.com executive. About 120 people work for the venture, according to published reports.

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