Word: diller
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First he lost a bidding war for Paramount Communications in 1994. Then his effort to take over CBS collapsed at the last minute. But last week Barry Diller, who masterminded the rise of the Fox Network for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. a decade ago, was no longer a mogul-without-portfolio. Diller, who heads up the unglamorous HSN, whose holdings include the Home Shopping Network and a stake in Ticketmaster, struck a deal for nearly $4.1 billion with Seagram Co. that lays a foundation for his own entertainment empire. Diller, 55, will pay Seagram $1.2 billion in cash plus...
...enterprise, called USA Networks, puts Diller back in prime time with a long-sought chance to compete with the major broadcast networks. And it brings Seagram new outlets for its TV programming through HSN's 18 broadcast stations. It also enables Seagram CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. to team up with pal Diller, one of TV's shrewdest programmers...
...crowd of advertisers in New York's Radio City Music Hall to announce her first fall schedule. It was an aggressive lineup, with 10 new shows and several old ones in new time periods. Among the newcomers: Total Security, a Steven Bochco drama about a security firm; Hiller and Diller, starring Richard Lewis and Kevin Nealon as comedy writers with families; and two fantasy-comedies for the Friday-night kid audience, Genie and Teen Angel, both produced by corporate parent Disney...
...which leads to what may be the most intriguing question of all: How does Consumer's Edge fit into Diller's long-range goals, which for big thinkers like him tend to amount to total world domination? Two years after his painful failures to merge QVC first with Paramount and then with CBS, Diller operates from a power base called Silver King Communications. It's a grab bag of second-tier media properties that includes the nation's sixth largest group of TV stations; the Home Shopping Network (HSN); the dormant production studio Savoy Pictures; and the Internet Shopping Network...
...will Diller be one of the CEOs who set them up? One can imagine--albeit with a bit of effort--some interactively televised descendant of Consumer's Edge and HSN merging with Silver King's stations and studio to become a force in 21st century media. In the absence of a brand name like Paramount or cbs, though, that would be a trick on a par with Diller's last one: building a fourth network on the backs of The Simpsons and Married...with Children...