NBC Universal (NYSE: GE), which is in the midst of talks to combine with the content assets of Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA), may need to do a serious rethink of its digital talent at the corp level. They haven’t replaced George Kliavkoff, the chief digital officer who left the company in October last year and joined Hearst. Recently, NBCU CTO Darren Feher left to join startup Conviva. The company didn’t replace Kliavkoff and Feher’s role, including digital consumer experience, has been split among others.we have a query in about Feher, although we do not believe there are plans to replace him. And now, Sab Kanaujia, the VP of Digital Product Strategy & Development at the company, is leaving, according to an internal e-mail he sent out to his team (posted after the jump). Kanaujia’s move is part of the decentralization of digital at NBCU; among the only corp digital senior execs left are Salil Mehta, who has digital as part of his corp dev/M&A responsibilities, though these days he is knee deep in the Comcast deal talks; then biz dev support on digital through JB Perette, president of Digital & Affiliate Distribution and Content Distribution Strategy
and tech for each business unit through John Eck, president, NBC TV Network and Media Works (where Feher reported). Others have digital responsibilities; for instance, Salil Dalvi for mobile and some other paid content initiatives. From January of next year, no corporate-wide digital initiatives are planned at NBCU, according to a couple of sources, as part of the cost cutting the company started last year.
Kanaujia, meanwhile, is moving onto entrepreneurial life, though it seems from the e-mail that he doesn’t have anything specific decided yet.
He joined NBCU in 2006, and worked on digital product strategy & dev across all NBCU digital businesses. He was part of the business incubation team Hulu responsible for putting the business structure around the JV. Prior to that he was at AOL (NYSE: TWX) heading AOL Video. He also recently launched TenSports.com in India, a JV site for live sports streaming, though remains to be seen what happens to the venture after he leaves.
Back to NBCU, now that the respective brands control their own digital destiny — with the exception being iVillage, which is part of Women @ NBCU and part of Lauren Zalaznick’s empire — some hard thinking needs to be done on how to manage the mid-sized digital properties that a Comcast-NBCU combine would have. Will Amy Banse and her team at Comcast Interactive take over everything digital at the combined company, if the deal goes through? It seem that they may need more firepower than that if they want to scale the biz beyond a guesstimated combined value of about $500 million or so.
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From: Kanaujia, Sab (NBC Universal)
Date: Tue, Oct 6, 2009
Subject: Moving on…
All,
As some of you know, I

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