astro
February 7, 2009, 5:56am
1
IN this article about Hollywood studio mergers & deals what are “pay slots”.
One huge factor that affected the deal is that DreamWorks originally said it would be coming with its own HBO deal. Those **pay slots **are very valuable in Hollywood so Universal was counting on that. But then DreamWorks quietly confided that it couldn’t make the HBO deal so now wanted to make use of Universal’s pay slots. Even though it didn’t want to, Universal stepped up and agreed. But next DreamWorks confided that it was not able to raise its bank financing to partner with Reliance so now demanded investment money from Universal. DreamWorks’ number kept changing up and down, early and late in the financing. Finally, they asked for $250 million from Universal. After a lot of hemming and hawing, Uni came back with an offer of just $100 million.
Wish I could help. But the only business-related definition of a pay slot I could find is an open job position - as in “With our recent expansion, we’ve got fifteen pay slots in marketing we need to fill.” - and that doesn’t seem to be what they’re talking about here.