Why did Comcast ever buy NBC?

Oh. Meine Zehen bringen mich um. Diese Schuhe sind viel zu eng. Trägst du immer noch diese spitzen Dinger? Ich meine, sind nicht alle Laufschuhe so geformt? Nein, du brauchst Altras. Altras? Altras sind geformt wie deine Füße. Mit einer fußförmigen Zehenbox. Einfach viel bequemer. Zwinge dein Lauf mit Hallenziehen. Okay, das klingt traumhaft. Mehr Komfort, Kraft und Dynamik. Alles durch die Passform. Altra versteht das einfach. Ultra, stay out there.

Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Mila Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Peter Kafka, who is chief correspondent at Business Insider and host of channels. A podcast about the media industry. It's a big week for the media industry. Comcast just announced that it's splitting itself up into the Comcast Broadband Company and the NBC Universal Entertainment Company. That comes after the Media Giant spun out its cable assets like CNBC and MSNow into a new company called Versant earlier this year. Quick note before we start, by the way, longtime Birch fans know we've been disclosing that Comcast NBC Universal was an investor in our parent company, Vox Media, for years now. That's all come to an end.

Not only did that investment spin out with Versant, but Vox Media itself is splitting in two, and that Versint stake now lives inside of a shell company that is part of a joint venture with a Penske Media Corporation called PMX, and PMX technically does not exist yet. It is all very complicated, and I promise I will sort out a simpler disclosure when all of these deals close. But for now, the upshot is the same as ever. None of these companies have ever told us what to do or say in our reporting, and we wouldn't let them if they tried. Which is good. Because Пітер, а Ло то саба Комкаст.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (64 minutes, 12,943 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.