Word: kirche
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...place far from the racetrack. Last week, some of the sport's biggest players - which include Renault, BMW and Fiat - threatened to set up a rival world championship to take off in 2008 when their current Formula One obligations expire. The car-makers were said to be concerned that Kirch, the German broadcasting giant that recently assumed control of Formula One's broadcasting and commercial rights in conjunction with EM.TV, would take the races off terrestrial TV and put them into the pay-TV arena. If the carmakers were posturing to gain a competitive advantage, it seems to have worked...
...reeled in more than $3 billion in IPO capital. They used that war chest to gobble up strategic chunks of the worldwide filmmaking and distribution industry, and many of those chunks are shriveling rapidly. Companies with names like Intertainment and Helkon Media ran rings around established German players like Kirch Media and Bertelsmann, which, perhaps wisely, stayed out of the fray. An additional $1 billion flowed into German film-production funds, which raise money from private investors for specific efforts like Mission: Impossible 2, which got $100 million from German sources...
This comes just as a worldwide trend toward locally produced television is kicking into high gear. But the newcomers are not fazed. "Movies like The Matrix were in that deal," Koenig says. "Kirch and Bertelsmann have a tremendous library of films, but they will still need to put up blockbusters from time to time when the public stations run something big." Either way, a wedge exists between the big old German boys and Hollywood's hot new indie producers...