Apple Eyeing Time Warner Acquisition | Hacker News Reader

Apple Eyeing Time Warner Acquisition

ir.net

30 pointsPetedoes52 comments

It'd be hilarious if every tech bubble was conveniently bookended with an acquisition of Time Warner.

I was just thinking: "it's come to that again..."

The article is not convincing enough. Till this point, they're just market rumors. Wait to hear some confirmation from Bloomberg or WSJ before analyzing it more seriously.

PS: Anyone noticed that the second part of the article reads like it's written by a robot, one of those AI reporters?

Of all the the big tech companies that have a stake in content delivery platforms, Apple has been the most quiet in terms of actually creating/commissioning its own content. This would certainly be a big swing in that direction and put them far on the opposite side even ahead of Amazon.

Do Google, Microsoft and Facebook have their own content?

Facebook and YouTube has all their original user-generated-content, and Microsoft has their failed 'Xbox Originals', like the Halo television series.

'YouTube celebrities' are very successful, and Facebook has actively been been trying to court these YouTube celebrities to post exclusively on Facebook.

Apple is seemingly the odd out not creating their own original video content, but Beats One is interesting as original _audio_ content, which no one else is doing.

Facebook's users are its content factories. Same goes for Youtube.

"Apple Time Warner" on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...

Not a fresh rumor. My take is still the same: this isn't doesn't make sense because Time Warner is local to the US and only parts of the US at that and Apple is a global company.

Not sure this would be the smartest move.

Aligning yourself with a company that has a notorious history of screwing its customers and providing less than decent customer service I think would instantly take that bulletproof Apple reputation and tarnish it immediately.

This alone makes me think this is another Apple head fake into the area of content creation.

Time Warner Cable (cable service) and Time Warner Media (HBO, CNN, Warner Bros Studio, etc) are distinct companies. The media business spun out the cable division years ago. Apple would be buying the media assets.

Time Warner is also looking at spinning off parts of it's business. I could see Apple acquiring the content-creating businesses (such as HBO) and leaving the, for example, cable delivery business with TW.

I don't buy it. Apple's business is fundamentally selling hardware that is differentiated with software and services and this acquisition would be too large and crazy to pay off for Apple's fundamental business.

The Apple Car rumors make a lot more sense.

That would be an awful development for those of us who are stuck with only Time Warner as an internet option and want nothing to do with Apple.

Time Warner Cable is an independent entity that was spun off from Time Warner (the media company).

It's really difficult for me to imagine Apple providing a worse customer experience in this sector than Time Warner currently does.

It's not the customer experience that's the issue. It's the 'Apple tax' pricing and the proprietary everything. Not a judgement, mind you, as everyone has their own balance of price vs form vs customizability vs function vs etc.

Apple Fiber vs Google Fiber? Sounds good to me.

Lovely that this site's "sponsored content" ads on the right are completely inappropriate for work and take up a pretty decent chunk on the page.

The images are:

1) Woman wearing shirt that exposes most of her breasts.

2) Man kissing a woman's neck while both are in bed. Man appears to be shirtless, woman is in bra.

3) Woman in bikini with her hands holding her breasts up.

4) Woman in cutoff white shirt having breasts sprayed with a hose.

5) Female cheerleader (this one is not so bad).

I'm not sure why any of that belongs on a business article about Apple eyeing a Time Warner acquisition.

#1 - why aren't you using AdBlock, or Ghostery, or Privacy Badger. Any of those would block these ads #2 - Since you are not using the tools above, you are sharing a lot of your browsing data to trackers elsewhere on the web that aggregate the content and present you with what they think you will like. No judgement, but maybe start using incognito mode for your NSFW browsing. I turned off my blockers and none of the ads I was shown were anything like what you describe.

I think his point was that a news site should have anything remotely NSFW.

Which is usually based on your browsing habits. You're not just shown random NSFW ads for nothing; which is what deanCommie's point was.

That's not how ad tech works. Just because I visit porn sites doesn't mean I get porn ads served to me on NYT.

Well, if the previous poster was actually at work, they may well be on a machine that they can't install software or browser extensions on - that's the case with my employer issued laptop, for example.

I'm a digital marketing manager, so part of my job is buying display ads and seeing what our competitors are doing with display ads.

Also see my reply to another comment that I opened the ir.net site in a brand new virtual machine with no history and got the same ads.

BTW, these ads might have been served in interest based fashion. It is not always safe to blame publishers for those racy inappropriate ads.

Yes, blame the publisher. Nobody sensible would allow other web properties to inject rubbish like this -- and it could literally be anything -- into their site. If they're going to do it, they should be held to account for it.

Since this all of a sudden has become a hot topic eclipsing the subject of the article, here's the list of ads served to me from top bottom:

1) Some shirtless dude on the beach probably on an island in Thailand. (PASS)

2) Before/After pics for a weight management program for a woman wearing a sport push up bra and yoga pants. Not seductive at all especially with fat bulging like this (PASS)

3) A racing model wearing a sexy Halloween style police outfit leaning on a fancy sport car. The model looks seductive but I am more interested in the car (FAIL)

4) A portrait pic of fair skinned woman with hazelnut eye color and dark brown hair color that looks like a young Megan Fox. Definitely attractive but absolutely not racy (PASS)

5) Some rich dude along with his butler in a speed boat leaving or entering a yacht through some kind of marine garage. Looks interesting but not risque material (PASS)

PS: I use Tor and this session is all about GitHub and HN so that might explain the nature of the ads served to me.

Install Adblock

My company's filtering system blocked the entire website, categorizing it as "phishing".

bzzzzt

Install uBlock.

No, install uBlock Origin - the one operated by the original developer.

After seeing your comment, I opened the article again, scrolled down, and didn't see anything like you were talking about. Then I remembered that I have uBlock Origin installed. It sounds like you might want to consider a similar ad-blocking extension.

Heh, funny, since I get mostly "Get rich fast" ads with pictures of stacks of Euros with ad number 2) from your description the only one that's the same :)

In any case it seems to tell a lot about geolocation targeting.

I'd normally hold my head in shame and think about what else I've been looking at to trigger these ads, but I know my work browsing is strictly professional :)

edit: Just checked on the site on a fresh EC2 Windows instance with no browsing history/cookies and got the same ads.

> no browsing history/cookies and got the same ads.

Maybe that's the point ;) With no history, they're using what works best :D

Until we find better ways for journalists to pay their rent that's what we are stuck with.

Hahaha. Glad I don't work where you work. Do you think some of those are are just retargeted to you based on your interest? Me thinks so, because I got ads for gyms and cleanmymac. No boobs here.

Here is a solution:

  1. Install adblock
 
  2. If your employer considers images of everyday things like that to be NSFW, get a new employer.  :-)

I know my work browsing habits are clean!

It's less of what my employer considers NSFW and more of what I don't want on my screen at work.

I will follow this up. I'm guessing that by clean, you mean no porn. However, your search history, even in a professional context, can say a lot about you.

  1) Search stack traces on google much? You are probably a developer. 

  2) Visit buzzfeed, vice.com, or other news sites, even on your lunch or coffee break? Click on certain stories that might skew to a male audience? 

  3) Have facebook or twitter open? Then you've just handed them the keys to the demographic kingdom.

Believe me, even at work the ad-networks know, at minimum, you are probably male -- hence -- boobs.

C'mon -- is it really that big of a deal? Since when did a little skin or innuendo become "unprofessional?"

When the US was populated by puritans from Europe ;)

No, I don't think that is it. This hyper-sensitivity happens in Europe as well.

It is a generational problem, mostly for the mellenials.

They have been brought up in a toxic and rigid culture multiculturalism and political correctness.

But I'll stop here before it really spirals down into non-HN territory. :-)

Are you serious?

Yes, I'm serious.

This is from the NY COMpost. Take this with very large grain of salt.

Interesting, because they used to own PIXAR but sold it to Disney.

If this happens it would put them in competition with them.

Apple never owned Pixar. You may be conflating them with Steve Jobs, who did own a majority stake at the time of the sale.

Oh, yes that's it.

Steve jobs used to own Pixar.

He became a billionaire again during the Pixar IPO with 80% of the stock.

If i'm not mistaken, he also became Disney's biggest individual shareholder.

That deal was on January 25, 2006. He became a board member and:

"The transaction was an all-stock deal – making Steve Jobs Disney’s largest shareholder (he owned 50.6% of Pixar at that time; he owned more than 70% of the company when Pixar’s first proxy statement was filed in 1997 but had been diluted by share issuance / option grants over the years). Disney’s proxy statement filed in early 2007 shows that Jobs owned 138,000,007 shares of Disney – enough for a nearly 7% stake in the company. The 10-K for 2006 shows that Disney stock ended the year at ~$30 per share – making Steve’s stake worth more than $4 billion."

http://www.gurufocus.com/news/315903/steve-jobs-investment-t...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com