Come next September, Membership First will blame AFTRA for having done a deal that undercut SAG's leverage, and will blame Unite for Strength for its pro-merger platform.
Due to their overlapping businesses, cost savings would be considerable in any combination involving Yahoo!, AOL or Microsoft, particularly in overhead and marketing, research & development and, in the case of a Microsoft-Yahoo! merger, ad platforms and technology investments.
Murdoch said he expected losses to continue for 12 to 18 months after a merger but the combined platform would turn to profit as less-costly soccer contracts were negotiated.
The merger gave Time Warner new platforms for its media properties like Time, People, Fortune, Warner Entertainment, HBO and CNN.
Meanwhile, I'm told that the merger of the two platforms makes Restaurantes.com the clear leader in Spain.
"In particular, Livio will be VP of Product for the group and Colin, LocalEyes' CTO, will be driving the merger of the two platforms," a spokesperson for BeMyEye tells me.
As they develop audiences with interesting characteristics — authority, realtime velocity, reach, etc. — they begin to establish a micro-community power base that can encourage mergers, acquisition by platforms, and the emergence of market standards.
The two companies also hope that their merger will serve as a platform for future deals.
"The merger will create the biggest platform of its kind ― and give Bayer-Monsanto a 'first mover' advantage similar to Facebook, in the way that it affects competitors," said Mute Schimpf, a spokeswoman for Friends of the Earth Europe.
One of the advantages of the DataUp/Dash merger is that the Dash platform has a more open architectural design that will greatly facilitate the process of supporting alternative metadata schemas.
And the pay-television business in Germany was hit when the EU vetoed a merger between Bertelsmann's pay-television platform and those of Leo Kirch, a German media mogul.
