Saturday, March 6, 2010

Corporations are weird

I just went to the The Weather Channel's website to see if tomorrow's supposed to be as nice as today (it is!), and noticed that in the field where you enter your location it says "Enter ZIP, City or Place (e.g. Disney World)". It occurred to me to see who owned The Weather Channel, figuring that the Disney World mention was because it was an ABC channel, but no: NBC owns it. I'm now guessing it's a paid advertisement.

Anyway, then on the wikipedia entry for NBC Universal, it says that it's 80% owned by GE, which I knew, and that it formed in a merger between NBC and Vivendi Universal, which I also knew. But I don't know much about Vivendi Universal, so I clicked on their entry.

Where I discovered that they've existed since 1853, but only got into media mogul-ship in the late 1970s and early 80s. Before that, they were a water company called Compagnie Général des Eaux, founded by an imperial decree of Napoleon III.

And now GE owns them and they make French TV and own the Universal Music Group.

I don't know, stuff is weird sometimes.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

I've had similar experience tracking people through shell companies...but those were all for the purposes of lawsuit. It is kind of amazing - like tracking the scions of noble houses must have been for last century's yobs. Get out of doors and go for a nice walk, it's beautiful out there. It's how I got to see a girl wearing a plastic fork behind her ear as a fashion statement.

thebaronette said...

we are fortunate enough to live in a city full of art students, because of this i once saw a girl with dreads that were tied around a fully inflated balloon like some kind of dirty cage.

Soj said...

The man to watch here is JM2, who made this happen (on the French end), who is himself a member of Le Siècle, a group that is more or less the (French) version of the Bilderbergers.

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Si%C3%A8cle

take a gander through the membership list and you might recognize a few names ;)

BTW "Canal Plus" does a hell of a lot more than just French TV - they are a major financier of several TV programs and movies throughout the EU.

Soj said...

BTW another source for quick weather info, just go to google and type "weather CITYNAME" and it pops up immediately - no need to load a complete website.

Not that google is paying me to plug them ;)

Ethan said...

The outdoors definitely are better than corporations. Spring is awesome.

Soj, thanks for that wikilink. Crazy. And yeah, I know Canal+ doesn't just do TV (they financed a bunch of movies I've loved).