Word: kirche
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...Kirch has always relished secrecy. His eponymous media empire - now crumbling under the weight of up to $10 billion in debt and other financial obligations - is so complicated that even seasoned observers are unsure of what is pledged to whom. His network of political and banking connections seems virtually impenetrable. He rarely gives interviews. He will not even say publicly which football team he supports. It's an interesting stance for a man who built his company in part on the loyalty of sports fans...
...attempt to draw viewers to Premiere, his pay-TV service, Kirch has in the past two years paid more than $2.5 billion for a slice of Formula One racing and the rights to screen live German football matches from Berlin to Munich. But the audiences have failed to appear - big time. The service is currently losing up to $2 million a day. Now, as his empire founders, Kirch has put his Formula One stake up for sale, with pundits predicting he will be lucky to get half his original outlay. Although the rights for soccer World Cups...
Though the prices for sports broadcasting rights have soared, audiences and advertising dollars have failed to keep pace. Kirch is not the only one to have been caught in the squeeze play. Last year, the Swiss-based sports-rights agency ISL collapsed after overpaying for the commercial rights - mainly for broadcasting and sponsorship - to a wide range of sports, including $1.2 billion over 10 years for men's professional tennis. Last month Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. wrote off $909 million on contracts to broadcast such sports as Major League baseball. Murdoch's BSkyB also wrote off the value...
...down his KirchPayTV stake, but he still holds a $1.5 billion "put" option - a risk-averse instrument that gives one the right to sell an asset at a pre-determined price - in the business that he could use as leverage to get his hands on any part of the Kirch empire that interests him. Including Formula...
...this just a story of Berlin vs. Brussels. The drama that is currently roiling German politics is the fall of Leo Kirch, the mysterious media magnate who controls a bundle of TV networks, plus the rights to warehouses full of movies and other goodies like the next soccer World Cup. He is in hock to the banks for about ?6 billion ($5.2 billion), and lots of loans are coming due these days. When Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-American ruler of a globe-spanning media empire, offered himself as a savior, Schröder sent out the signal: "No foreigners...