After Monday afternoon discussion, Amy Pascal began to engage with the heads of three old public television networks, which of course was a smoke bomb, and Simon's real goal has not changed.

Faced with Daenerys Entertainment's acquisition intention, the three major TV networks all gave quite positive responses.

Jack Welch, chairman and CEO of NBC's parent company General Electric Group, quickly called Simon directly after Amy contacted him. However, Jack Welch said on the phone that General Electric did not want to give up the media business completely, but wanted to sell half of the equity to Daenerys Entertainment, which obviously could not meet Simon's requirements.

CBS's actual controller Larry Tisch hopes to talk to Simon in person. Simon's interest in CBS is lower than NBC. Both sides only made two calls. Larry Tisch gave a quote during the second call, which is equivalent to a 50% premium of CBS's current market value, and is completely treating Simon as a fat sheep.

Not only that, the news that Daenerys Entertainment was interested in acquiring CBS was soon spread in the circle, which led to a significant increase in CBS's stock price. Simon was happy to see such confusing remarks, but his impression of Larry Tisch directly dropped to freezing point.

The merger and acquisition agreement was not reached and the news was quietly released to the outside world, which was a very destructive thing.

The ultimate goal is still to fall on ABC.

At the Melisandra party after the Oscar at the end of March, Simon had a contact with Warren Buffett, the major shareholder of Metropolitan ABC Group. Buffett was not resistant to selling ABC. However, the veteran investor was obviously quite entangled between the cash and stock trading modes, and also tried to open a debt-to-equity conversion plan that Simon could not accept.

In the past month, the stock price of Metropolitan ABC Group has reached nearly US$17 billion driven by the overall bull market trend of the US stock market. Similarly, affected by the good news of the opening of Universal Studios Osaka, the market value of Daenerys Entertainment Group has also exceeded US$140 billion.

The stock prices of both parties have set their own highs, and in the eyes of the capital market, they are also somewhat inflated.

With Buffett's cautious investment style, coupled with the recent capital gains tax reform bill coming to pass, the possibility of this veteran investor directly choosing to cash out the entire Metropolitan ABC is becoming increasingly important.

The all-cash acquisition will not dilute the Westeros family's holdings in Daenerys Entertainment, which is also the result Simon hopes to see most.

Daenerys Entertainment Group has cash reserves of more than US$7 billion, and its current overall debt is only US$7.3 billion. Compared with its market value, the debt ratio is only 5%. Even if the acquisition of Metropolitan ABC Group in all cash will probably only increase Daenerys Entertainment's debt ratio to about 15%.

For most companies, the debt scale of 15% can only be described as conservative, completely within the controllable risk range.

Now, the biggest problem between the two parties is actually to negotiate a reasonable price.

Simon is very rich, but he will never be a sucker.

Since it is a good intention to acquire, Simon can accept a premium of about 30%. If a lion speaks like Larry Tisch, Simon would rather talk to General Electric. In addition to being unwilling to let go, Jack Welch's sincerity in cooperation is still very strong.

In the busy schedule, the 1995 summer season officially started.

On Friday, May 12, the first bombshell movie "Red Tide Storm" this summer was released. The submarine war film, co-starring Jerry Brookheimer, Tony Scott, Denzel Washington and other well-known Hollywood filmmakers, cost $53 million. The producer Disney Company has prepared 2,383 screens for the film.

From this point of view, confidence is obviously insufficient.

At the same time, New World Pictures also released a biographical novel adaptation of "The Diary of the Edge". The film is starring Leonardo DiCaprio, the young "Little Plum" and Mark Wahlberg, who was still a young man. It tells a story of degenerate youth about skipping classes, taking drugs, basketball, and drug addiction.

This low-cost youth film with a production cost of $7 million is generally similar to the "Psychedelic Cowherd" that Gus Van Sant had a good box office reputation a few years ago. The film contains many handsome men and beautiful women who are popular among young people in the rebellious period and passionate squandering. Although the film critics have a bad reputation during the preview stage, New World Pictures still gave 516 screens to open the screen, trying to make a long run in this upcoming summer season.

Speaking of which, after completing the promotion of "The Edge Diary", Little Little has entered the crew of the modern version of "Romeo and Juliet".

This is also a project of New World Pictures.

Australian director Baz Ruman made his mark in Hollywood with the film "Heroes of Dance" three years ago. Later, the director, who obviously likes to work hard and meticulously, prepared for this new film for three years. During this period, he also participated in the stage play creation for a period of time and has finally started filming his own new film recently.

The former Little Little Little Lion also successfully advanced to the popular young actor with the box office of this modern version of "Romeo and Juliet", and then won the role of "Titanic".

Simon is not going to change that.

While the summer season is on, the two dark horse films in the first half of the year, "This Man from Earth" and "Anti-Wisdom Stars 3" are still sticking to North American theaters.

The box office week just passed from May 5 to May 11, "This Man from Earth" released in the 11th week, received another $2.53 million in a single week, and the cumulative box office has reached $229.31 million. The film is expected to be completely painted before "Jurassic Park 2" is released on June 2, and the total box office in North America is about $235 million.

$235 million, slightly lower than the earlier expected $250 million. If you look at the reason, it is because "Anti-Wisdom Star 3" is too strong, which has squeezed out the box office potential of "This Man from Earth" of about $15 million.

"Anti-Witness 3", which started on April 7, was released in the fifth week, with a box office drop of 23% compared to last week, and continued to earn US$14.69 million, with a cumulative box office of US$143.45 million. There are still three weeks left before the release of "Jurassic Park 2" on June 2. According to the steady decline of about 20% for several consecutive weeks, the film's total local box office exceeds US$200 million.

Simon May 12th, this heavenly man is in San Francisco.

After completing the employee stock ownership plan, Egret's IPO is ready and can submit a prospectus to the SEC at any time, so Simon no longer needs to pay too much attention.

This time it was mainly for Tinkobaier's business.

Simon established this electronic products company founded by Girl C. In recent years, taking advantage of the Internet's east wind, it has been developing rapidly.

In the past 1994, Tinkobaier's shipments of digital camera products reached 7.16 million units, which achieved a high growth of 159% compared with 1993. Including other products such as iDisk, the portable flash drive, had an annual revenue of US$2.19 billion and a net profit of US$270 million.

Before we knew it, this new concept technology company that was not revealed at the beginning of its establishment has grown into an electronics product giant that cannot be underestimated by the industry.

In a series of products released on April 8, after careful preliminary market research, the Tinkobaier team finally gave up the 300,000 pixel toothpaste squeezing strategy of continuing to maintain the 300,000 pixels, and upgraded to 500,000 pixels. However, the initial planned capacity of 150M storage of 3,000 photos was also reduced to 120M storage of 1,000 photos.

Because according to the questionnaire data, many potential users think that the capacity of 3,000 photos is a bit exaggerated and cannot be used up at all. 1,000 photos not only show the product advantages of the latest mini hard drive version iCam-50, but also does not make users feel overperformance, which is just right.

Increasing sensor resolution and reducing storage capacity also balances the costs of the new iCam-50 to the greatest extent.

Moreover, the iCam-50 still maintains a retail price of $499, which is very attractive to older iCam users. As a transitional floppy disk version of iCam-40s, it still uses a 300,000 pixel sensor, and Tincobaier also lowers the price to $449.

As another main product, iPlayer-10 has chosen a 500M micro hard drive, which is also the most expensive core component in this digital music player product.

According to the MP3 audio format launched by Igret, the iPlayer-10 is enough to store 100 to 150 songs, with a content duration of 500 minutes, which is equivalent to 8 hours. Although this will inevitably come at the cost of losing sound quality, in fact, many facts have proved that most ordinary users do not have high requirements for player sound quality.

The biggest limitation of the promotion of iPlayer digital music player is actually content.

The Broadcast website, which was deployed in the Westeros system several years in advance, successfully solved this problem.

At the same time as the iPlayer-10 was released, Daenerys Entertainment provided Broadcast website with 300,000 genuine music, including popular records from the Backstreet Boys and Gun Rose in recent years, as well as all singles Simon released over the years. Although 300,000 genuine music is still pitifully small compared to the music copyright scale of the entire European and American music circles, and it is actually not all that Daenerys Records owned. However, the Broadcast website's audio books, talk shows, educational courses and other genuine film review resources have greatly made up for the lack of music resources.

Not only that, the difficulty of cracking iPlayer is actually very low.

This actually means that users can easily obtain various pirated music from Internet platforms.

Western people have a wide range of genuine payment habits, and only those who have to sell them. In fact, many people are willing to spend money to buy genuine resources.

Of course, if the genuine resources cannot be found, then it is a pity.

Once iPlayer was released, the industry soon noticed this problem, and some record manufacturers also threatened to file a lawsuit.

Simon's attitude towards this is just a soldier.

With the example of Sony winning a video recorder lawsuit back then, it is actually difficult to win such lawsuits.

Simon's personal attitude is that he will not condone piracy for the sake of the promotion of iPlayer. He hopes that through the rapid popularization of this product, major record manufacturers will agree to sell their own music on the Broadcast website.

The Internet is a fairly wild open platform.

If you don't want to overgrow the weeds in this field, the best way is to carefully cultivate various useful crops.

That's the truth.

The press conference was held on April 8 and officially started on April 15. As of May 11, it was exactly four weeks. It does not count the edge products such as iCam-40s and iDisk-20 used for transition. The two main products that Tincobaier this year, the mini-hard disk version of iCam-50 digital camera and digital music player, iPlayer-10, have been extremely popular in the market.

Because the early production capacity is still on the rise, especially the iPlayer-10, out of caution, Tinkerbaier's team did not prepare too much stock, so they chose to start another "hunger marketing" on the Amazon Online Mall flagship store, which has officially settled in. It has to be said that this simple and crude marketing model is still very effective. Coupled with the tracking and reporting of many media, it has become more and more popular with the two new products.

The result of being too popular and the market is frequently out of stock, even leading to the frequent occurrence of robberies in various parts of North America in recent days.

The same price of $499 is actually mainly aimed at the middle class with relatively abundant family conditions. After all, only these families have supporting personal computers and Internet access. iCam is very dependent on PCs. Before iPlayer appeared, there was no frequent robbery cases.

However, compared to Sony's portable Walkman, the iPlayer-10 has a lighter body that can hold hundreds of songs at once. Moreover, even if you are not connected to the Internet at home, you can easily download all the music you can imagine in Internet cafes that are already spread all over North America. Such a magical tool is simply a dream for many music lovers.

You should know that the most power outage in New York in 1977 was the number of audio equipment stores, which greatly led to the rise of hip-hop music.

All right.

Yes, most of the robbers were black people.

The same is true this time.

For iPlayer released by Tinkobaier, it can not only be snatched for itself, but also because of the shortage of supply, the price of black market acquisition is also quite considerable, which has led to frequent robbery cases specifically targeting this product. As a brother in distress, iCam has also been implicated. They are all products of one company. They are all very powerful, so it is definitely correct to snatch it.

A murder occurred in the Chicago area. A couple listened to music on Lake Michigan while using the latest iCam-50 to take photos. Perhaps it was too conspicuous. Even during the day when people were around, they were still robbed by two black young men. The boy among the couple was stabbed by a sharp knife due to resistance and died unfortunately due to excessive blood loss.

Two black young men were arrested and the murder was for sure.

However, the two poor people could only be thrown into prison. The boy's parents' depression was unrest. They filed a lawsuit against Tinkobaier's company, believing that Tinkobaier's products indirectly led to the unfortunate incident, and they asked for a claim of $100 million.

There are many such unreasonable lawsuits in the United States.

While Tinkobaier actively responded to the lawsuit, he had to use some media to remind users to keep a low profile as much as possible in the process of using the ‘i’ series of products, which also became the focus of discussion for a while.

These episodes did not affect the hot sales of the two new products at all.

In the first week of opening sales, it was just the North American market. Including reservations, iCam-50 won 320,000 units in a single week. Other markets such as Japan, the United Kingdom, and Australia that were simultaneously launched also sold 130,000 units, with a total of more than 450,000 units in the first week of the world.

This is still the case when some important markets such as France and Germany cannot be opened for sale simultaneously.

iPlayer-10 is temporarily limited to the North American market.

In the first week, the first batch of 100,000 iPlayer-10s were sold out when stocking. Starting from the second week, Tinkobaier launched 200,000 iPlayer-10s to the market every week, and the supply was still in short supply.

As of May 11, the total global sales of iCam-50 have reached 1.53 million units in four weeks. The four-week shipments of iPlayer-10 players have reached 700,000 units in a neat manner.

Even if the sales of iPlayer-10 are less than half of the iCam-50, many people have seen that this digital music player product, both in terms of popularity and potential market capacity, is obviously more optimistic than the iCam series.

iPlayer-10 not only caused frequent robbery incidents across North America, but in the second-hand market, most of the resold iPlayer-10s are even higher than the official price. There have even been cases where someone posted a $1,200 auction platform eBay, which is supported by the Westeros system, and successfully sold it, which has more than doubled compared to the $499 price.

The scalpers appeared because of this.

Speaking of which, because of the wide demand for music by Westerners, the market capacity of digital music players is indeed much larger than that of digital cameras. With Apple's closed attitude, the annual sales of iPods at the peak of that time could exceed 50 million units. At that time, the era of smartphones had arrived, and in fact, it had missed the golden age of digital music players promotion.

Now, the Internet has emerged and smart devices have not yet become popular. It is the best time to promote digital music players.
Chapter completed!