Ebersol: Comcast's Roberts long interested in NBC's sports assets

Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA) Chairman-CEO Brian Roberts considered combining the MSO's sports assets with NBC five years ago, long before the company began serious negotiations to buy the network as part of an NBCUniversal package from General Electric, said Dick Ebersol, NBC's outgoing sports group chairman.

"I've known Brian for years. And we'd always talked about trying to do something together," Ebersol said during a wide-ranging interview with the Wall Street Journal. "And at one point he talked to GE long before they were ever talking about a deal or anything, he wanted to know if there was some way that we could combine our sports assets, way back when, like five years ago."

Roberts as an acquaintance, apparently, was a better deal for Ebersol than Roberts as a boss. He abruptly resigned last week citing, among other things, that he was tired of "additional bureaucratic duties under Comcast," the article said.

For more:
- the Wall Street Journal has this story

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