Time Warner is now considering splitting the AOL side into two entities, the ISP side and the content side. Time Warner says that the 84% ownership AOL has in Time Warner Cable is “less than optimal.”
The chief financial officer, John Martin said it will take “several more months” to separate the AOL businesses “because it’s fairly complicated.”
It doesn’t look like Time Warner would get rid of any part of the AOL side of things which is incredibly good. Time Warner does make a considerable amount of content that AOL is the perfect place to distribute it from, AOL Video is already becoming one of my favorite places to go for good content that is nice to watch (specifically their in2tv stuff), not to mention the fact that Time Warner’s Road Runner service could be serving it up to customers.
If anything I think that Time Warner needs to get rid of the dial-up ISP business that AOL has been in for such a long time. Road Runner is pretty profitable and I’m sure that getting rid of that part of the company would free up some resources and allow them to shift money to other places in the company. The only problem is, I’m not sure if they could really get rid of their dial-up customers, they are already paying a super high rate for the dial-up service but for some reason they keep on paying.
I’m not sure what this will really mean for the company though, separating AOL into two divisions sounds like a good idea but I’m hoping that they are only doing this as a first step to getting out of the dial-up ISP business and focusing on improving the other part of the company.