Word: murdochs
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Each side will contribute $200 million to a global joint venture in which programming and electronic information produced by News Corp. will be distributed to businesses and consumers in digital form through MCI's vast web of fiber-optic cable. But here too Murdoch may not have to ante up cash, just "content.'' Low risk but high potential profit for him-that's typical of the entire deal. If MCI eventually invests the full $2 billion, it will own 13.5% of News Corp. But the terms of the deal require MCI to vote its shares in the same proportion...
...years ago, in which Bell Atlantic proposed to absorb the cable giant Tele-Communications Inc., was called off before it could go forward. While MCI has a strong customer base among businesses, for instance, News Corp. has little in the way of business information services to offer them. For Murdoch, the most important advantage of MCI's already established presence on the Internet is the second chance it offers to his flagging on-line service, Delphi. It ranks a distant fourth behind America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy. That could change fast if MCI promoted Delphi to its 16 million residential...
...America Online is going like lightning," Murdoch pointedly told Time in March, "but they are spending a lot of money to enlist customers." Murdoch also said then that next season he plans to introduce a new and more sophisticated version of Delphi, which he hopes will feature new access software that will make it easier for subscribers to point and click their way onto the Internet. That could put him head-to-head with software's maximum leader, Bill Gates, whose Windows 95, set to debut in August, also promises to speed users onto...
What the MCI-News Corp. alliance indisputably does right off the bat is fatten News Corp.'s coffers. To Murdoch, with billions jangling in his pocket, a good part of the media world must now look like so many packages wrapped with bows, just waiting for him to untie them. Late last week he grabbed for one, making a $2.8 billion bid for the three television networks of Italy's former Premier Silvio Berlusconi, which are watched by nearly half the country's TV audience. And then? "Ted Turner may want to retire," he joked mordantly at a press conference...
...Murdoch also lacks a music division, one of the entertainment industry's most reliable profit centers. One solution would be to acquire EMI, known for such performers as Garth Brooks and Sinead O'Connor. Or Murdoch might go after the 15% stake in Time Warner, worth about $2 billion, that the Seagram Co., which recently bought MCA and its Universal Studios, may be ready to unload. But another buyer for those shares, the phone giant AT&T, is rumored to be in talks with Time Warner...