Company Time Warner Inc./Home Box Office (first package)
Date Announced 3/1/1999
Site 42nd St. and Avenue of the Americas
Total Subsidy $10 million

Amount tied to job creation

???
Promised Job Creation ???
Promised Job Retention ???
Length of Contract ???
Competing Sites none
Conditions none
Notes The city granted this $11 million in tax breaks after media behemoth Time Warner's cable channel HBO renewed its lease in a building across from Bryant Park in midtown. Few in the real estate industry expected HBO to leave the city. A year earlier, Richard D. Parsons, president of Time Warner, had argued that he only wanted the same kind of subsidies the city had granted to his competitors: Bertelsmann A.G., Viacom Inc. and NBC (New York Times, 6/29/99).
Corporate Notes Time Warner is the world's largest media conglomerate, even before its planned merger with internet firm America Online. Time Warner's holdings include cable television systems and cable channels, including CNN and HBO, as well as the WB broadcast television network, the Warner group of record labels and the Warner Bros. movie studios. Time Warner's publishing division, Time Inc., received a $28 million package barely three months after this HBO deal.
Critics
A note on sources -- or why many of these profiles appear incomplete. They are. Good Jobs New York compiled the numbers in these profiles from press releases and news accounts of the deals. Unfortunately, more detailed information on these subsidies is very difficult to obtain -- even though it should be readily available to the public. In many cases, neither the company nor the city nor state released certain information, particularly the terms of the agreement, i.e., the conditions which the company had to meet in order to receive the subsidy. It should also be noted that the value of the subsidy may not end up being equal to the value estimated at the time of the agreement. And it should not be assumed that the actual number of jobs retained and created will be the same as the numbers predicted.

Because the public deserves easy access to information about how taxpayer dollars are being spent, Good Jobs New York will update these profiles as we uncover more information.

Good Jobs New York  - May 25, 2001