High (or medium) finance

Whenever I post a picture of GSN President David Goldhill, I swear he was separated at birth from baseball's Michael Young. Just a frightening likeness. Right down to the, er, sizable ears.

Anyway, I'm not running the photo just to make fun of Mr. Goldhill's facial features. As anybody can see from my photo on this blog, I've got plenty of facial issues myself. Instead, I saw this interesting MediaPost story on the ownership machinations about our little game show network.

As I posted a while back, Sony recently bought back 5% of GSN from co-owner DirecTV for $60 million, a transaction which valued the entire network at $1.2 billion. The story says that Sony will now have operational control of the network, despite its smaller ownership stake.

Seems a little unusual, and the story explains:

In March, [Sony] paid $60 million to DirecTV for an additional 5% in GSN, increasing its position to 40%. With that, DirecTV also gained the right to force [Sony] to become the new majority owner. [Sony] would have to up its stake to 58% for between $234 million to $288 million, according to a Sony SEC filing.

Using those amounts, depending on earnings, that would give GSN an estimated value of between $1.3 billion and $1.6 billion, over the period of 2012 to 2014. Based on the March deal, the current value of GSN would be $1.2 billion.

The story says that neither Sony nor DirecTV would offer any explanation for these wheelings and dealings. Writer David Goetzl speculates that Sony might want a platform for Internet games based on its extensive library of game shows. Goetzl also says that GSN would benefit from advertisers placing a higher value on older viewers. No kidding.

EVER SO SLIGHTLY RELATED UPDATE: TV.com is running a throwdown between ABC Family and GSN. The description of GSN actually mentions horrible memory Late Night Liars. Passers-by are invited to vote for their favorite of the two networks. I abstained. Gotta be objective in my game show punditry (that's a joke, folks).