NBC Universal Acquires The Weather Channel For $3.5 billion

Bain Capital, Blackstone Group and NBC Universal have reached an agreement to buy The Weather Channel from Landmark Communications. This will end many major media companies interest in acquiring the channel. The financial deal were not disclosed but the industry sources say that the deal would worth about $3.5 billion and the deal would also include several Weather Channel related assets such as weather services for newspapers and radio stations and the widely used www.weather.com website. Time Warner Inc., CBS Corp. and Comcast have opted out of the bidding process. The Weather Channel with 37 million monthly unique visitors was launched in 1982 with annual revenues of $550 million and has about 1,300 employees.