Media Monday: Comcast Arbitrage & Axel’s Telegraph Thesis

**Jon Kelly** (0:02)
Some people may live in LA and go to Universal. A lot of people fly in, the state hotel is nearby, NBC owns the real estate, NBC can charge rent to whoever the rights holder is, Marriott, etc.
Obviously, the tickets, the merch, the food, and all you're doing is maintaining the real estate.

**Peter Hamby** (0:20)
Welcome to The Powers That Be Daily, Puck's podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby. It's Monday, July 6, which means it's Media Monday. Today, Jon Kelly and I pick apart the most valuable assets up for grabs at NBC Universal and explain why theme parks like Universal Studios are so valuable to media companies.
We also pressure test an idea from Axel Springer, whether there's a center-right market in the United States for the Telegraph UK, as Matthias Dauphner tries to expand the Telegraph's audience beyond Britain. We'll discuss all that and the big USA game tonight on today's episode of Powers That Be.

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**Peter Hamby** (1:42)
Happy Monday everybody and welcome to The Powers That Be. I hope you had a great holiday weekend, whatever you were doing. A reminder, the United States faces Belgium tonight in a huge knockout game. Jon Kelly is wearing his Belgium shirt if you're watching on YouTube. He's a big Belgium guy.
I, of course, am repping Team USA as always. Jon, I'm just kidding. I know you're being a patriot. We should actually not talk about soccer. I just want to compliment Jon Kelly, everybody, on the heater of a baseball season that he just accomplished, coaching his kids in Montclair. Congratulations, Jon.

**Jon Kelly** (2:21)
Thanks, Jeff.
Got the chip. Chip number four for these kids. Peter, I like In Bruges a lot. I feel like that's one of my top 30 movies maybe.
So I do feel some sort of connection to Belgium. But obviously, I'm rooting for the USA. My big question for you though was, how was the Taylor-Travis wedding? I heard you guys closed down the garden till 2 AM. It seemed a little decadent to me.

**Peter Hamby** (2:54)
Yeah. We were sitting in the Macy's across from MSG. They put us at this spare part guest table, and we were lucky to get an invite.
Travis Kelce, his vows were incredible. That guy is a talent, a wonderful writer, just an incredible, just very literate guy. I was moved by Travis' words.

**Jon Kelly** (3:19)
Do you think this is gonna be a Liz Taylor marriage?
Are they gonna go the distance? I know that you think about this a lot. I'm just curious if you were a betting man.

**Peter Hamby** (3:33)
I think about this all the time, as you know. Opposites can attract. Travis does seem like a party guy. But then again, I do think Taylor Swift was kind of a nerd, but you saw her at the Knicks playoff game.
She was at Coachella with Travis a couple years ago, definitely not doing MDMA. So she likes to party a little bit too. So maybe, there's just things you can't see into any marriage. I'm rooting for them and I know you are too, Jon.

**Jon Kelly** (4:01)
I'm rooting for love all the time, Peter. I have to say, the tillers of Nick's bandwagoning to me was borderline larceny. But I guess I can get down with an MSG wedding. It's funny. I was, Rebecca and I, we went to see Death of a Salesman on Friday.

**Peter Hamby** (4:22)
Travis was there too, obviously.

**Jon Kelly** (4:24)
He actually, he wrote it with Arthur Miller. But the police state around the garden was a useful reminder to them, like, if you want to be hated in New York, the surefire way to do it is to shut down traffic on a holiday weekend.

**Peter Hamby** (4:43)
Yeah, that's like Bush doing the 2004 convention in the MSG. It's just like that.

**Jon Kelly** (4:49)
It's funny. I know nobody wants these tangents, but I've got to tell you one of my formative stories. I just started my career. This was the summer of 2004 I graduated college and started my career. I got caught in a drag net.
This is the paranoid police state in New York post-911. They shut down all of 42nd Street between 5th and 6th, not far from the library. I was actually going to Jamba Juice before getting on the train. It was an embarrassing personal detail. They shut down the street and handcuffed me in the plastic cuffs, along with about another 100 or so New Yorkers. This is in the era when there were no civil liberties, Peter.