Will “30 Rock” Be Renamed the “Comcast Building?” Updates and Reactions on the Comcast-NBC Deal

Yesterday afternoon, Comcast announced they’d buy out GE’s remaining share of NBC for $16.7 billion, meaning TV programming and distribution are at last united. Here’s what analysts, journalists and Tina Fey have had to say about the deal.

Bloomberg: “Comcast shares jumped as high as 9.1% yesterday after the sale. An analyst adds that “Comcast got it at a steal, a phenomenal price,” and that ‘NBCU is worth north of $40 billion if you turned around the movie studio and got the broadcast network to work.'”

The New York Times revisits the long history between NBC and GE:

The sale ends a long relationship between General Electric and NBC that goes back before the founding days of television. In 1926, the Radio Corporation of America created the NBC network. General Electric owned R.C.A. until 1930. It regained control of R.C.A., including NBC, in 1986, in a deal worth $6.4 billion at the time.

Speaking of which, in the deal, Comcast also buys the iconic GE building in Rockefeller Plaza–i.e. 30 Rock–where Saturday Night Live, and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon are shot. Which means, of course, that they get naming rights too. Though no change has yet been announced, Wikipedia has already decided that the building has been renamed the “Comcast Building.”

And that, as the Atlantic Wire points out, is something 30 Rock (which just wrapped up its series finale) foreshadowed.

A 2011 episode began with Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy watching the GE sign on the roof of 30 Rock get replaced with the Kabletown logo on the “very same day that the real NBC’s employees had a town meeting with their new Comcast boss, Steve Burke, unofficially marking the beginning of that takeover,” as Vulture reported then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pynhWJ06jck

Finally, Reuters reports that Comcast does “not anticipate it would be required to file for antitrust approval with either the Justice Department or the Federal Communications Commission” since the feds already vetted the earlier 2011 Comcast-NBC deal. It also points out that since that deal, “Comcast has slowly but steadily replaced NBC’s former regime with its own people,” meaning we can only expect more Kable running our basic cable TV from here on out.