Nbcuniversal

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.

Releasing its earnings one day early because of the complexity associated with its new controlling interest in NBCUniversal, Comcast Corp. said Tuesday that it lost 39,000 cable-TV customers in the first quarter, the smallest subscriber loss in four years, and that its profits rose 9 percent, to $943 million. It was the second consecutive quarter in which the company substantially slowed the drain of cable-TV customers, which has become a worry of Comcast executives and analysts.

Comcast Corp. said Wednesday that it was filling one of its top lobbying positions with a Federal Communications Commission official who voted in January to approve its $30 billion merger with NBCUniversal. Meredith Attwell Baker, a Republican FCC commissioner, will become senior vice president of government affairs for NBCUniversal in Washington after her FCC term ends in June, the company said. Before being nominated by President Obama to the FCC (she became commissioner in July 2009)

Releasing its earnings one day early because of the complexity associated with its new controlling interest in NBCUniversal, Comcast Corp. said Tuesday that it lost 39,000 cable-TV customers in the first quarter, the lowest subscriber loss in four years, and that its profits rose 9 percent, to $943 million. It was the second consecutive quarter in which the company substantially slowed the drain of cable-TV customers, which has become a worry of Comcast executives and analysts.

WASHINGTON - A top telecommunications regulator who voted to approve Center City-based Comcast Corp.'s takeover of NBCUniversal in January is leaving the Federal Communications Commission to join the company as a lobbyist. Meredith Attwell Baker, one of two Republicans on the five-member FCC, will become senior vice president of government affairs for NBCUniversal. Comcast said it did not begin discussions with Baker about a possible job until after the transaction had closed. Baker will leave the FCC on June 3, less than a month before her term was set to expire.

After four decades of snapping up U.S. cable companies, then acquiring the news-and-entertainment giant NBC Universal Inc. in 2011, Comcast Corp. is ready to take on the planet. Whizzing through the Swiss Alps on Thursday afternoon on the road to the Zurich airport, America's cable-TV king, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, was having a globalization aha! moment after attending his first World Economic Forum in Davos. He was high - not only in altitude, but in mood. "The new technologies make it a flat world," Roberts said, referring to the best-selling book The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Friedman.

A Comcast Corp. regional sports network will assume sports coverage for an NBC TV station in northern California, the first case of the cable company's sports content replacing a traditional sports report at an NBC broadcast affiliate. NBCUniversal will examine whether similar synergies exist in other markets where it owns a local TV station and a regional sports network, including Philadelphia, where the company owns NBC10. Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, acquired 51 percent control of NBCUniversal in January.

Comcast Corp.'s NBCUniversal agreed to buy the 50 percent stake in two Universal Studios theme parks it doesn't already own from the private-equity firm Blackstone Group L.P. for about $1 billion. The transaction puts the overall value of the Orlando, Fla., parks at about $3.17 billion, Philadelphia-based Comcast said in a statement Monday. Blackstone, based in New York, paid about $275 million for its stake in 2000. Blackstone had set a June 12 deadline for NBCUniversal to buy its stake, after which the private-equity firm would have had 270 days to sell the entire operation.