General Electric is saying goodbye to 30 Rock — the building and the TV business born there.
It’s another step in GE’s efforts to focus on less glamorous — but theoretically more profitable — ventures such as manufacturing medical imaging equipment, airplane engines and electrical generators.
The Fairfield, Conn., company announced Tuesday that it is selling its 49 percent stake in NBCUniversal to Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable TV operator, for $16.7 billion. Comcast had bought a majority stake in the television and movie company in January 2011 and was expected to buy out GE’s remaining stake over the next several years.
General Electric will use the money to accelerate its share repurchase program to approximately $10 billion in 2013.
“This transaction allows us to significantly increase the cash we plan to return to shareholders in 2013, to approximately $18 billion, and to continue to invest in our industrial business,” GE CEO Jeff Immelt said in a statement.
GE is giving up its stake in one of America’s best-known brands.
The sale includes the NBC broadcast network, which airs everything from “Law & Order” to “The Office” and “The Biggest Loser.” The company also owns cable networks Bravo, CNBC, Telemundo, USA and the Golf Channel. There’s also Universal Pictures, which over its 100 years has offered movies including “To Kill a Mockingbird,” ”The Sting,” ”Jurassic Park” and “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.”
GE’s capital unit will also sell the floors NBCUniversal occupies in the iconic 30 Rockefeller Center building in New York as well as property in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., for $1.4 billion.
The sale of the Rockefeller Center floors includes naming rights to the building, which has featured giant red “GE” letters at its top since 1988, a prominent part of the New York skyline.
A spokesman for Philadelphia-based Comcast did not immediately comment on the company’s plans for the 1933 Art Deco building.
GE’s history with NBC goes back to 1919, when it co-founded the Radio Corporation of America, or RCA. The company pioneered commercial radio broadcasting. In 1926, RCA launched a television arm: the National Broadcasting Company, or NBC. Within two years, it had started the first regularly scheduled U.S. television programming in Schenectady, N.Y., then the site of GE headquarters.
GE sold its stake in RCA in 1932. But in 1986, GE ended up acquiring RCA, selling off its record label and television-manufacturing business. All that remained was NBC.
During the GE years, NBC was home to a number of hits including “Friends,” ”Seinfeld,” ”ER,” ”Frasier,” and the “West Wing.” Millions of American tuned in each night to watch the network’s lineup, which was sold as “Must See TV.”
In 2009, GE sold its majority ownership of NBCUniversal to Comcast for $8 billion in cash and reduced its ownership share from 80 percent to 49 percent. Tuesday’s sale of the remaining stake gives GE cash to focus on its industrial businesses, such as building train locomotives, wind turbines and lights.
In 2007, just before the financial crisis hit with full force, GE’s finance arm accounted for about 55 percent of the company’s earnings, according to spokesman Seth Martin. NBCUniversal contributed about $3 billion of the company’s $22 billion in operating profit.
In 2012, GE’s industrial segment — including a growing energy-infrastructure business — had a profit of $15.49 billion, compared with $7.4 billion from GE Capital.
General Electric CEO Immelt said that Tuesday’s sale of NBCUniversal will allow his company to “accelerate our investment in our core businesses.”
Showbiz might be sexy, but for GE the profit apparently is in manufacturing the devices that generate the power for our TVs.
AI-Assisted Works Can Get Copyright With Enough Human Creativity, According To U.S. Copyright Office
Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could further clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.
The nation's copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated.
And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office's approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the "centrality of human creativity" in authoring a work that warrants copyright protections.
"Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection," said a statement from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the office.
An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artist's handiwork is perceptible. A human adapting an AI-generated output with "creative arrangements or modifications" could also make it fall under copyright protections.
The report follows a review that began in 2023 and fielded opinions from thousands of people that ranged from AI developers, to actors and country singers.
It shows the copyright office will continue to reject copyright claims for fully machine-generated content. A person simply prompting a chatbot or AI image generator to produce a work doesn't give that person the ability to copyright that work, according to the report. "Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine ...... Read More