Cinedigm Set to Become Top Non-Theatrical Home Video Distributor With GVE Acquisition

In another major expansion, Cinedigm Corp. on Thursday announced the acquisition of the Gaiam, Inc. entertainment unit GVE, for $51.5 million. It will make the company the distributor of programming for the WWE, NFL, National Geographic, Discovery, the Jim Henson Company, and others.

GVE president Bill Sondheim becomes president of Cinedigm’s Entertainment Group, reporting to Cinedigm CEO Chris McGurk and COO/CFO Adam Mizel. According to McGurk, this acquisition will make the combined companies the largest U.S. distributor of non-theatrical home video.

"It's a giant transformative deal for us," McGurk told The Hollywood Reporter, adding: "Now we’ve got huge scale. That’s going to enable us to attract even more and better content. We already have the biggest library of video rights in the world. This can dramatically accelerate its size. I think at the end of the day because there’s still an arms race for content on digital platforms, the company that controls the most rights is going to be in the driver's seat and we're hoping that’s the position were going to be in now."

According to the announcement, this will increase Cinedigm’s annual retail sales to about $320 million annually. According to guidance provided with the announcement, that will add about $84 million in revenue in the next six months, which means on an annual basis Cinedigm revenues will rise to about $150 million, compared to the $88.1 million the public company reported in June.

GVE was the fourth largest independent distributor of non-theatrical home video product last year, with strong positions in children’s, family, comedy, and sports documentaries, among other programming.

Cinedigm said this will give them direct sales and marketing relationships with every major physical and digital distributor, including Wal-Mart, iTunes, and Amazon. The release said it will give them “the largest retail footprint of any independent studio distributor in the United States, with products sold through over 60,000 retail locations.”

It will also expand their library of digital distribution rights for independent films, TV series, and other content, including more than 32,000 titles and episodes. "We gave a tremendous amount of leverage in physical distribution, in digital, and we can distribute to theaters. We think this puts us in the driver's seat among all independents right now," McGurk said. 

McGurk expects this to also accelerate Cinedigm's move into over the top channels like Docurama, a documentary service distributed on a paid YouTube channel.

Gaiam is retaining its health and fitness business, its e-commerce platform, and Gaiam TV, a streaming video subscription business. Gaiam said in its announcement that it will use the proceeds to pay down its existing credit facility.

In the two and a half years since McGurk took the helm of Cinedigm, he has completely transformed the company. When he arrived, it was primarily a company that did digital distribution of movie theaters. Today, most of the digital conversions are done, and Cinedigm provides maintenance services for a fee. 

Its main businesses now have to do with distribution of content. It distributes specialty titles to movie theaters, both for traditional runs and for special event programs; it acquired New Video, which made it a big player in digital distribution; it spun off two non-core business; and now it has acquired a major physical distribution business in home entertainment."It's one-stop shopping," said McGurk. "And that’s what we love about this deal."

To finance the acquisition, Cinedigm announced it has a new $55 million credit facility from banks led by Societe Generale Corporation and Investment Banking. It also issued $3 million in restricted Cinedigm stock to Gaiam and $2 million in stock was purchased by an existing investor who wasn't named. 

Cinedigm is also issuing $13 million in new stock with B Riley & Co. and National Securities Corp. The acquisition is expected to close Oct. 21. 

Blackstone Advisory Partners acted as Cinedigm's financial advisor and Merriman Capital acted as advisor for the equity stock offering. 

Cinedigm stock closed Thursday at $1.53 per share, down 3.77 percent from the prior day's closing. 

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thr/business/~3/ItljGBiafhI/story01.htm
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China punishes 13 medical workers for bribery in milk powder case

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese authorities in the northern city of Tianjin have punished 13 medical workers for taking bribes from Danone S.A. to recommend the French food maker's infant formula, the local government said on Monday.

The move comes after the official China Central Television (CCTV) reported in September that Danone bribed doctors and nurses to recommend its Dumex milk powder brand at one Tianjin hospital.

The CCTV report led to Tianjin's government and police launching an investigation into the bribery charges. Danone also said it had launched an investigation.

The "serious violators" received penalties ranging from cancellation of medical licenses to salary deductions, Tianjin's government said in a statement on its website. Several of them had to go through Communist Party disciplinary procedures.

Athena Wang, the spokeswoman for Dumex China, told Reuters the company had no further comment, but reiterated that it had launched and completed an investigation.

Local government investigators said the workers were among 116 people from 85 hospitals and health groups who took bribes from Danone to give talks to parents of newborns, recommend Dumex formula and give out product samples, the statement said.

World Health Organization guidelines, implemented in China, say doctors must advise new mothers to breastfeed unless there are medical reasons to use formula instead.

Infant formula has been controversial in China since a scandal in 2008 when the industrial chemical melamine was added to baby milk and killed at least six children and left thousands ill.

The incident seriously damaged consumer confidence in local firms and led to international competitors gaining market share.

Corruption is widespread in the health care system, fuelled in part by low salaries for doctors and nurses.

(Reporting by Megha Rajagopalan and Adam Rose; Edited by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/china-punishes-13-medical-workers-bribery-milk-powder-105759862.html
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Iran presents nuclear proposals at Geneva talks

GENEVA (AP) — Six world powers are taking a closer look at what Iran is describing as a possible breakthrough deal that could ease suspicions it is interested in nuclear arms.

Iran says it is not interested in such weapons and is offering a proposal meant to dispel such fears. In return it expects the easing of crippling international sanctions on its economy.

A second day of talks between Iran and the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany resumed Wednesday. The plan presented Tuesday focuses on six-power demands that some activities that could be used to make nuclear arms be stopped or reduced.

An Iranian official tells The Associated Press that the proposal is divided into three stages but declines to offer detail. He demands anonymity because the plan is confidential.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/iran-presents-nuclear-proposals-geneva-talks-133548918--finance.html
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Tom Foley, A House Speaker Who Embraced Compromise And Comity

Democrat Tom Foley served Washington state's 5th Congressional District for 30 years and was House speaker from 1989 to 1995. He died Friday at age 84.

Jeff T. Green/AP

Democrat Tom Foley served Washington state's 5th Congressional District for 30 years and was House speaker from 1989 to 1995. He died Friday at age 84.

Jeff T. Green/AP

Former Speaker of the House Tom Foley was the product of far different times, yet his career in politics a generation ago still carries a message current congressional leaders might want to heed.

Foley came to Washington with new Democratic members elected on the coattails of Lyndon Johnson's presidential landslide in 1964. The son of a judge, he had hoped to follow his father on the bench but missed out on an appointment and decided to run for Congress instead. In that fall's Democratic tide he defeated a 20-year Republican incumbent in eastern Washington's largely rural 5th District.

He served on the Agriculture Committee, a place where party mattered less than alliances by region and commodity. He learned how to put de facto coalitions together and move big bills that literally determined the food-and-fiber fate of the nation. As congressional tasks went, there was none more basic. And after a relatively short time, Foley was the committee chairman.

The electoral fates of others continued to open opportunities for the man from Spokane. He moved into the leadership as chairman of the Democratic caucus, then became the party whip when John Brademas of Indiana was defeated. When Tip O'Neill retired in 1987, Foley became the Democratic majority leader; and when Speaker Jim Wright resigned in disgrace two years later, Foley became the speaker.

He immediately set about healing the rifts that had made the House a rancorous and nearly impossible chamber in the late 1980s. He helped engineer the extraordinary, four-month-long budget negotiation in 1990 that led President George H.W. Bush to break his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge.

That bipartisan agreement was initially rejected by majorities of both parties in the House, but Foley helped overcome the opposition of Republicans like Newt Gingrich and secure the deal's enactment. Deficits would soon begin to decline, and by the end of that decade the budget was basically in balance, a situation that was rapidly reversed after the election of the second President Bush in 2000.

Foley was in some ways ideally suited to be speaker, because he held together the regional and ideological factions of his own party while speaking calm and consistent reason to his foes across the aisle. In the 1980s it was common to hear Republicans say Foley was their favorite Democrat and ought to be speaker. He combined formidable powers of intellect with an unusual talent for hearing other people out. "I am a little bit cursed," he once told this reporter, "by the ability to understand the other person's point of view in an argument."

That did not always endear him to his Democratic colleagues, of course, and it was not nearly enough to maintain the affection of Republicans when the partisan wars resumed late in 1991.

That was when the then-General Accounting Office reported that House members were routinely writing overdrafts on their accounts at the House bank. They were, in effect, writing themselves interest-free loans on paychecks they had yet to receive. Some members had hundreds of such overdrafts.

Foley always argued that the controversy was overblown. No money had been lost; no checks had actually bounced. It was a minor abuse of privilege, perhaps, but no crime. Nonetheless he was compelled to close the House Bank and launch an ethics investigation that grew well beyond its initial mission. Some Democrats and Republicans alike met defeat in the primaries of 1992; others, in the elections that November.

The other disaster that overtook Foley's speakership was the election of a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who took office in 1993. Clinton undertook to stimulate the economy with new spending and to raise taxes beyond the 1990 budget agreement. He also set in motion a vast overhaul of the health care and insurance systems that failed to win approval from Congress.

The upshot was an anti-Democratic upheaval in the midterm elections of 1994. It cost the party its control of the Senate for the first time since 1986 and its control of the House for the first time since 1954. Foley himself was unable to hold his GOP-leaning district back in Washington state, becoming the first sitting speaker to lose his own seat since 1862.

Foley had made a critical error in the campaign year: He had allowed his name to be attached to a lawsuit in his home state that challenged a term-limit referendum approved by the voters there. He was, in a sense, suing his own voters.

But in a larger sense, Foley was in the way of a huge historical turnaround. On that November day in 1994, Republicans captured a majority of House seats, Senate seats and governorships in the South for the first time since the Reconstruction era. The GOP has held the upper hand in all three categories ever since.

Foley himself would have preferred to be remembered as a leader for the institution of Congress. He saw the speaker as "the leader of the whole House," not just the majority party. He had hoped that better times in the 1990s would allow greater cooperation between the parties, much as there had been in his salad days as a junior member on the Agriculture Committee.

He had also hoped that aggressive challengers on the GOP side, such as Gingrich, would grow impatient and move on, leaving the House to more conventional and traditional Republicans like Bob Michel of Illinois.

Instead, in the wake of the House Bank fracas and the rise of Bill Clinton, Gingrich was thrust to the forefront of his party. And when Foley met his downfall, Gingrich and not Michel became the first Republican speaker in 40 years.

Today of course, we look back on such wars as being all but ancient history. But Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, looking back on recent weeks, may see a distant mirror for his own 2013 House. He has surely reflected on how internal struggles among Democrats weakened Foley's hand two decades ago and ultimately cost him his majority.

After losing his place in Congress, Foley served six years as President Clinton's ambassador to Japan. Foley died Friday at his home in Washington, D.C., following a stroke and a bout with pneumonia. He was 84.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/10/18/237226522/tom-foley-a-house-speaker-who-embraced-compromise-and-comity?ft=1&f=1003
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Today's special: Apoplectic over Apple, lax at LinkedIn, bearish on Ballmer

Credit: cogal

It's been a while since I've taken a dip into the reader mailbag. There's certainly been a ton of things to talk about -- from the future of Apple and Steve Ballmer's impending retirement to LinkedIn's turn toward spam and our nation's turn toward Big Brother. Let's dive in, shall we?

In "Stick a fork in Apple, it's done," I took a few roundhouse swipes at the Kings of Cupertino, arguing that Samsung has emerged as the technology thought leader now that the Steve Jobs reality distortion field has been powered down. As you can imagine, that didn't sit well with some readers. More than 90 comments later, people are still ticked off about it. Some of them found their way to my inbox.

[ For a humorous take on the tech industry's shenanigans, subscribe to Robert X. Cringely's Notes from the Underground newsletter and follow Cringely on Twitter. | Check out InfoWorld TechBrief, your source for quick, smart views on the news you'll be talking about -- subscribe today. ]

M. C. tells me he's glad I'm "a hater":

Apple is not Betamax. And with the cash hoard they have, they can acquire what they need to stay in their wheelhouse. What Earth-shattering product has Samsung brought out that changed the way we live, like iTunes did for changing the way music is distributed and listened to?

Cat got your tongue????

Don't bring a knife to a gun fight unless everyone is out of bullets!

How would you feel if I brought a cat to a tongue fight? Tweaking Apple fanboys is so much fun I don't know why I don't do it more often. (Look for more of that next week as the next Apple not-so-special event arrives.)

Endorse this!
I got a lot of feedback on my story about LinkedIn ("LinkedIn lawsuit exposes amateur moves of 'professional' network"), nearly all of it in agreement with my scathing assessment of the business network's aggressive tactics. For example, L. D. writes:

I find that the initial goal of this organization has been completely lost, and the acts they perform to increase registrations of new members harkens back to a time when magazine publishers would give away millions of unread magazines so they could tout their inflated readership numbers and raise the prices of their advertising space.

I see or at least surmise that LinkedIn is up to the same trick. There is no intention to verify skills and create an actual "professional" network, but merely to [go] after advertising revenue, with little or no concern about their members' privacy.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/t/cringely/todays-special-apoplectic-over-apple-lax-linkedin-bearish-ballmer-229094?source=rss_infoworld_blogs
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UFC 166 weigh-in video

At the UFC 166 weigh-ins, all 26 fighters taking part in Saturday night's UFC 166 fights will step on the scale Friday evening, and we'll have the live video here at MMAFighting.com.

In the main event, UFC heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez and Junior dos Santos will have to make the heavyweight limit of 265 pounds.

The UFC 166 weigh-in takes place at 5 p.m. ET at the Toyota Center in Houston, and the video is above.

Source: http://www.mmafighting.com/2013/10/18/4848428/ufc-166-weigh-in-video
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Stenographer Credits 'Holy Spirit' for Rant Against Congress (ABC News)

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