Nbcuniversal

About a dozen tea party activists from the Philadelphia area gathered outside the Kimmel Center on Wednesday - site of Comcast Corp.'s annual shareholders' meeting - to protest the company's ownership of the liberal-leaning MSNBC 24-hour cable news channel. Inside the meeting, shareholders peppered Comcast chief executive officer Brian Roberts about the company's decision to ban local gun-shop advertisements. There were also complaints about the Rev. Al Sharpton, host of PoliticsNation on MSNBC.

It's final. Comcast Corp. closed Tuesday on its $16.7-billion purchase of the 49 percent of NBCUniversal it didn't already own. The cable giant announced the deal in February and it did not need federal government approvals, which had been obtained when Comcast purchased the first 51 percent of NBCUniversal in early 2011. "We are excited the transaction has closed and look forward to taking full advantage of the opportunities for growth and innovation at our combined company," Comcast said.

STAMFORD, Conn. - Officials call Connecticut the sports-media headquarters of the world, with the 19-building complex that is ESPN in Bristol and offices for World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. and the Yankees' YES Network here. Now they can add NBC Sports. Lured by generous tax credits and modern TV studios, the Comcast Corp.-owned NBC Sports is bailing on 30 Rockefeller Plaza in midtown Manhattan - the most prestigious address in the TV business - after rehabbing and reconfiguring a Clairol hair-products factory for $100 million.

NBCUniversal head Steve Burke announced on Monday that the entertainment company hired the former CEO of Univision, Joe Uva, to head its Hispanic franchise, including Telemundo. Also, Bonnie Hammer has been promoted to head all cable channels and Lauren Zalaznick will direct innovation, monetization and emerging technology at NBCUniversal. All three will report to Burke. "More than ever, we need to simplify our organization and take advantage of the breadth of our assets," Burke said in an memo.

Comcast Corp. could have run NBCUniversal in a joint venture with General Electric until 2018. But acting now to buy the remaining 49 percent of the news and entertainment conglomerate, investment analysts say, means that Comcast does not risk having to pay more for it later. Because Comcast has directly operated the company for two years, the deal signals confidence that the cable giant can restore rundown NBCUniversal to health, the analysts say. On Wednesday, Jessica Reif Cohen of Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Matthew Harrigan of Wunderlich Securities called the deal a "steal.

Comcast Corp., flush with billions of dollars from sales of assets and bonds, rapidly accelerated its acquisition of NBCUniversal on Tuesday, saying it would pay $16.7 billion for the 49 percent of the entertainment, news and film conglomerate that it doesn't already own. The Philadelphia cable giant expects the deal to close within the next six weeks. The seller is General Electric Co., which sold Comcast 51 percent of NBCUniversal in 2011. Comcast and GE were expected to operate NBCUniversal as a joint venture until at least mid-2014, and Comcast could have continued the joint venture through 2018.

Media companies have committed to pay more than $110 billion for the TV rights to show live sports well into the next decade. These giant financial obligations are higher than a cost estimate reported in The Inquirer in 2012 and follow two years of frenzied bidding for TV sports content, such as Comcast Corp.'s $4.4 billion cost to televise the Olympics through 2020. Recent corporate regulatory filings detail the huge bet the nation's largest media companies - the Walt Disney Co., CBS Corp., Time Warner, and News Corp.

Local gun shops in the Comcast Corp. cable-TV territory, which extends over an area of 50 million U.S. homes, won't have the option of advertising on Comcast after this month. Comcast, the nation's largest cable system and a media conglomerate, says it banned gun and weapons advertisements to align its advertising policies with those at NBCUniversal, the news and entertainment company it acquired control of in early 2011. Comcast spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice said the White House did not request that the company stop advertising firearms.

With celebrities tweeting and viewers sharing Facebook "likes" for TV shows, Comcast Corp. and NBCUniversal will announce today that they will invest in the British social-TV start-up zeebox and help launch its app in the United States. It's a huge boost for zeebox, as it enters the U.S. market on the nation's largest cable system. Zeebox aggregates TV show information, Twitter feeds, and other data for smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Using the zeebox app, TV viewers can toggle their attention between a live show and its real-time social-media buzz on a "second screen.