• The Hollywood Reporter, Thursday, May 15, 2008 11:45 AM

A couple of years ago, Comcast Corp. tried to buy the Walt Disney Company. The idea was that marrying content and distribution would create an unstoppable media combination. And while a Comcast-Disney merger never happened, the same logic was behind News Corp.'s purchase of DirecTV. "We felt very strongly that we needed to have distribution. Content is king, but you've still got to get distribution," News Corp. chair Rupert Murdoch said in November 2005.

But Murdoch was later forced to backtrack when he decided to sell the satellite TV provider to Liberty Media two years later. "Our content is pretty well established," he said at the time. Recently, Time Warner made a similar move when it announced that Time Warner Cable would be spun off into a separate company. Now, John Malone's Liberty Media is the only media company to own a big U.S. distributor.

The change in sentiment comes partly as a result of the digital revolution, which has focused large media companies to become more focused and nimble. The lumbering bureaucratic media conglomerates of old are ill-equipped for the fast-paced world of the Web, the primary direction in which media consumption is moving. Soon, the Web will become the only means of media distribution, but providing such service comes at a massive cost, and has little to do with the content production business.

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