You are viewing the archive: “Guggenheim Partners”

Curveball Over LA Dodgers TV Deal For Guggenheim And Major League Baseball

By NIKKI FINKE, Editor in Chief | Friday March 8, 2013 @ 4:01am PSTTags: Guggenheim Partners, LA Dodgers, Major League Baseball, Time Warner Cable

Few consumers are welcoming the new Los Angeles Dodgers/Time Warner Cable TV deal because they’re going to get screwed out of more hard-earned money per month. They can thank Guggenheim Partners which bought the Dodgers with an ownership group including Magic Johnson and Peter Guber for $2.15 billion last year. Guggenheim plans to carry the games on a new regional sports network it’ll own called SportsNetLA. It’s got Time Warner Cable doing the heavy lifting as its charter distributor, exclusive advertising and affiliate sales agent, and channel operations manager. But now there’s a problem: the January deal has yet even to be submitted to Major League Baseball for approval. The reason is that MLB wants to know exactly what its cut of the $7 billion, 25-year television deal will be. And Guggenheim looks like it’s trying to pitch curveballs to the league. Trust me, if you think Hollywood studios are greedy, you’ve never seen sports team owners or their leagues. So this is greed vs greedier vs greediest.

To summarize what’s in dispute, the current collective bargaining agreement’s base portion of the revenue-sharing plan calls on MLB teams to contribute 34% of net local revenue. But the way that figure gets calculated is becoming increasingly blurred by stuff like these regional sports networks and who owns them. Guggenheim’s deal is even blurrier. So now everything from rights fees, naming rights, guaranteed carriage money, and other revenue expected to go into Guggenheim’s wallet can be picked by MLB’s revenue-sharing plan. That’s the crux of the delay. Why didn’t Guggenheim forsee this? [ESPN on Thursday explained it very well here.] None of this would have been in dispute had Guggenheim taken the straightford but still gynormous Fox Sports deal on the table first.

News Corp wanted to continue in business with the Dodgers. At one point it owned the team and pays about $40 million a year to broadcast the games. But that contract expires this year. In fact, the Fox Sports offer was just $100M behind Time Warner Cable’s. But News Corp execs are still furious at Guggenheim’s Todd Boehly who conducted the Dodgers negotiations and according to insiders never seemed to know what he should do. (“He was the strangest man I’ve ever dealt with,” one exec puzzled.)

Boehly led the media giant into thinking it had a deal during an exclusive negotiating window, and then let News Corp twist in the wind. While Fox wanted the team for its new national sports network which starts August 17th to rival ESPN, Time Warner Cable needed the Dodgers more to pair with its 20-year LA Laker deal and as a hedge against retransmission fee hikes. In the end Boehly opted for the riskier SportsNetLA deal for Guggenheim - he’s a part-owner and expects more reward if the gamble pays off – than the sure thing with Fox Sports.

Problem is, no amount of big money can put the Dodgers at the same status level as, say, the Yankees. And then there’s the disgrace of what this deal is doing to consumers and their love of sports. Any day now enough viewers will hate on the Dodgers deal and give up watching to force an end to this price gouging.

RELATED: LA Dodgers Plans Sports Channel With Time Warner Cable As Charter Distributor
RELATED: Fox Closing In On Deal For Dodgers’ TV Rights: ‘We’re Out’ If Not Done By Nov. 30

Comments (10)

Last Shoe Drops: The Hollywood Reporter’s Jimmy Finkelstein Finally Removed — Is Sale Next?

By NIKKI FINKE, Editor in Chief | Tuesday January 15, 2013 @ 10:00am PSTTags: Big Deals Film, Big Deals TV, Guggenheim Partners, Prometheus Global Media

Guggenheim Partners today announced the hiring of a badly needed digital media CEO, presumably to put some fiscal diet discipline over its assets including The Hollywood Reporter‘s bloat. In the process it has removed the last remaining Prometheus Media equity owner managing THR after its 2010 purchase. Gone with the wind is Jimmy Finkelstein, who tried unsuccessfully to turn the publication into a profitable venture. Guggenheim announced that it has acquired the remaining stake in Prometheus Media from Pluribus Capital, which was founded by Finkelstein, who previously served as  Chairman of Prometheus Media. So here’s what happened: it’s been well known that the disliked Finkelstein clashed often with Guggenheim, which for the past year installed its own bean-counters to monitor the celebrity sheet. And inexplicably in July Guggenheim placed Dottie Mattison in charge, even though she is known for loving the Red Carpet limelight more than overseeing the journalism of the job. Finkelstein had a reputation around the Reporter as a nasty piece of work, so there will be lots of dry eyes to see him go. He never understood that, to make the publication profitable, costs had to be slashed and not constantly soared, to Guggenheim’s horror. The fault lies with Guggenheim’s Todd Boehly, whose lousy idea it was to buy into Hollywood — and now can’t wait to get out so he can continue investing in sports. (His newly acquired Dick Clark Prods just effed-up Sunday’s Golden Globes production-wise.)

One of the problems was that Finkelstein, who owned legal trades years ago, overestimated his own ability to turn a profit in today’s crowded consumer media marketplace. Although it’s true that The Hollywood Reporter has enlarged its one-off traffic, it still is not widely consumed by the entertainment community. Instead Hollywood and the businesses that rely on it are addicted to lean and mean Deadline Hollywood, which focuses exclusively on showbiz instead of celebrity. THR‘s plan under original Prometheus Media CEO Richard Beckman was to publish a subscription-based magazine. That quickly fizzled, and the Reporter print edition is distributed free for the most part (and to zip codes like Florida). Beckman, who was hired in 2010, was demoted in 2011 and then kicked to the curb in June. Finkelstein would have met the same fate earlier except he was an equity owner in Prometheus Media and convinced naive Guggenheim to let him try to affect a turnaround. Now his removal paves the way for Guggenheim to finally sell the Hollywood trade, something the investor has wanted to do almost from the beginning of its asset acquisition which was always plotted as a fixer-upper to be flipped.

Meanwhile, Penkse Media Corp (owner of Deadline Hollywood) is still waging its lawsuit against The Hollywood Reporter for copyright infringement.

Here’s Guggenheim’s release today: Read More »

Comments (7)

Time Warner Says THR/Barry Meyer Claims “Complete Fabrication”

By NIKKI FINKE, Editor in Chief | Wednesday July 18, 2012 @ 1:24pm PDTTags: Barry Meyer, Big Deals Film, Big Deals TV, Guggenheim Partners, The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros

“The Hollywood Reporter has really hurt their credibility. I don’t understand how they could write that stuff. It isn’t true,” Time Warner told me. The Hollywood Reporter Jeffrey BewkesThe strong denial was about a July 11th THR article … Read More »

Comments (4)

Dodgers Bankruptcy-Exit Hearing April 13

By THE DEADLINE TEAM | Saturday April 7, 2012 @ 7:01am PDTTags: Dodgers, Guggenheim Partners, Magic Johnson

The bankruptcy judge in the Los Angeles Dodgers case has scheduled a hearing April 13 to consider whether to confirm the revised Chapter 11 plan filed yesterday, ESPN reports. The Dodgers said the team is on track to exit … Read More »

Comments (0)

Big Names Continue To Emerge As Groups Gather To Bid For Dodgers

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Friday December 2, 2011 @ 12:17pm PSTTags: Guggenheim Partners, Larry King, Los Angeles Dodgers, Magic Johnson, Mark Cuban

L.A. Lakers icon Magic Johnson is the latest big entertainment name to throw his hat in the ring to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers, which are currently in bankruptcy protection and could be about a month away from holding an auction to sell the franchise. The NBA Hall of Famer probably won’t be the latest high-profile star to attach himself to a potential ownership group — Johnson’s team, confirmed today, is a Santa Monica-based group of private investors known as Guggenheim Baseball Management, which includes Mark Walter, CEO of financial services firm Guggenheim Partners, and veteran baseball exec Stan Kasten — as bidders jockey for position in an auction in which the team will likely fetch more than $1 billion. (Johnson and his Magic Johnson Enterprises sold his ownership stake in the Lakers last year and also is part of the group that is trying to bring the NFL to downtown Los Angeles, so he’s definitely a serious player.) Other big names being bandied about as part of separate possible Dodgers ownership groups include Dallas Mavericks and HDNet’s billionaire owner Mark Cuban — he tried to buy the Chicago Cubs from Tribune a year ago — and former CNN host Larry King. Those kind of high-profile figures also don’t hurt in boosting the Dodgers’ profile as networks prepare to take a crack at landing the team’s lucrative local TV rights, which could mean a $3 billion windfall to the financially strapped team — if the courts can ever decide how that process will unfold. Read More »

Comments (1)

UPDATE: Prometheus Selling ‘Back Stage’; The Hollywood Reporter’s Parent Company “Dropping Assets Like Flies Now”

By NIKKI FINKE, Editor in Chief | Monday October 3, 2011 @ 12:25pm PDTTags: Guggenheim Partners, Prometheus Global Media, The Hollywood Reporter

The Hollywood Reporter’s Parent Company Continues To Cost Cut: Prometheus Pulled Plug On Hollywood Creative Directory

… Read More »

Comments (2)