The Return Of The Dinosaurs

Watching a feature on dinosaurs on this morning's breakfast TV got me thinking about the telecoms industry (I wonder why ?).

It's deja vu all over again as BT mulls a bid for its former mobile business, O2. Of course, in the US AT&T was broken up and then, like some mythical creature, put itself back together again.

In the global media market nothing works like scale, but the key question is how to scale ?

Some organisations, such as Comcast, look to offer and control more and more of the same patch: it is a company that has shown very little interest in expanding beyond its US cable base, but has by default become involved in the global content market through massive acquisitions such a NBC Universal.

Others have built vast international networks - UK telco Vodafone and Spanish telco Telefonica among the most prominent of these. And these companies keep on threatening to enter the media market in a serious way - Telefonica once upon a time bought and then sold Big Brother company Endemol.

Now there is talk of Vodafone buying European cable giant, Liberty Global, or Liberty Global buying ITV, or BT buying EE, which itself was formed from the merger of T-Mobile and Orange in the UK.

Are you keeping up ? I'm not sure anyone is. Apart from a bunch of specialist investment bankers who must be looking forward to 2015 with glee (or literally with Glee in some cases).