Time Warner Inc.’s spinoff of its cable division dropped the New York-based owner of Time magazine and Warner Bros. to third place among U.S. media companies, behind Walt Disney Co. and News Corp.

Disney, based in Burbank, reported fiscal 2008 sales of $37.8 billion. Excluding $17.2 billion in cable revenue, Time Warner’s 2008 sales totaled $29.8 billion.

New York-based Time Warner divested the unit, the second-largest cable company in the U.S., because it no longer needed the division to guarantee distribution of its channels including HBO and CNN. With the split, which took effect on Monday, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. becomes No. 2, with $33 billion in sales.

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