accounting scandal just after the flotation that spooked investors and its overly ambitious international expansion plans have backfired. But for Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research, the collapse was more fundamental and inevitable than that.

Mulpuru was an early critic of Groupon. "This IPO game isn't about finding value, it's about finding a greater fool who actually believes the valuation is true. Trust me, you will be the fool," she wrote in a blogpost before the share sale. Needless to say, she's not too surprised that things have gone so horribly wrong. "Anybody who looked at this objectively could see where it was heading," she says.

Groupon's enormous growth was fuelled by massive marketing spending and media hype, she says. "It was like a Fourth of July fireworks display:Peacock Streaming Service to Break Even by Year 5, Comcast CFO Says

At a UBS investor conference Monday in New York, Michael Cavanagh also said that NBCUniversal would invest $2 billion in the direct-to-consumer offering over two years, which will be free for Comcast subscribers.

Comcast's NBCUniversal streaming service Peacock, set to launch in the spring, will invest $2 billion over the first two years and break even by year five, Comcast CFO Michael Cavanagh said Monday.

Speaking at the UBS Global TMT (Technology, Media & Telecommunications) Conference in New York in a session that was webcast, the exec said that much of the early spending would be on content and marketing, but the different approach compared with competitors would ensure that near-term losses would be lower. Cavanagh also said that