By Lianting Tu

2009 has been a year of media consolidation. Major players kept themselves busy for mergers, acquisitions and restructuring, if not for running their businesses.

Comcast and NBC Universal, Disney and Marvel, Liberty Media with XM Sirius, just to name a few. In this year’s UBS Global Media and Communications Conference last week in New York, more questions were raised than answered.

Robert Wolf, CEO of UBS Americas, predicts “continued consolidation” in the media sector.

“Media giants have done lots of cost-cutting. They have good balance sheet but not much growth yet. I think we’ll see continued consolidation coming to 2010 and beyond,” Wolf said in an interview with CNBC.

The happy marriage between NBC Universal and Comcast reminds us the miserable merger between AOL and Time Warner ten years ago which produced more disasters than synergy. Last week AOL officially split from Time Warner and became a stand-alone company. With its future yet to be known, I wonder whether the hype that content need to marry distribution is just a failed idea.

Last week, Time Warner’s former CEO Gerald Levin appeared on Fox Business News to defend the AOL-Time Warner deal ten years after the merger. “I don’t regret the concept underlying the transaction,” he said, “I obviously regret the aftermath. The guiding principal was a digital makeover of an old-media company.” Doesn’t it sound anything but truth?

Right now, as it will take at least a year for the Comcast and NBCU deal to get approved by the FCC, the deal hasn’t affected the workers and system of the both companies yet. I hope when the deal finally goes through, the result will be better than just another round of layoffs.