Word: superhighways
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...never easy. He managed only to whittle his speech down to what an Administration wag called a "tight 64 minutes" -- half again as long as most recent State of the Union speeches. He limited his top priorities for 1994 to seven initiatives, eight if you count the information superhighway, but couldn't resist adding a dozen or so secondary and tertiary items, amounting to an enormously ambitious and detailed to-do list by any standard. The carefully planned practice sessions were postponed until Tuesday, and then nearly backfired: the price of the hurried run- throughs was the early onset...
Vice President Al Gore unveiled the Administration's grand design for the coming information superhighway. Though a bit stingy with details, Gore said the Administration will push for legislation that encourages deregulation and greater competition among traditional rivals, allowing telephone and cable-TV companies to enter each other's business, for example. He also indicated that the Administration will press the telecommunications industry to provide both affordable "universal service" to all households and free access to the info highway to schools, libraries and hospitals. Initial industry reaction was favorable...
Which is why so many current business stories, especially those involving glamorous, huckstery businesses -- that is, information superhighway businesses -- are providing such extensive pleasure. In the just completed fight over the right to televise professional football games, and in the interminable fight for control of Paramount Communications, it doesn't require much contrarianism to see the nominal winner in each instance as the ultimate loser...
...around $200 million a year -- which means Fox has agreed out front to squander tens and probably hundreds of millions of dollars during the next four years. The deal, Fox's Rupert Murdoch blithely concedes, "will certainly be a loss." But these days in the televi -- that is, information superhighway -- business, the iffy expenditure of billion-dollar sums is required in order to be considered visionary. "It's a plan for the future," says Lucie Salhany, Murdoch's charmingly high-strung network president, of the football deal. "It takes the network to another level." In other words...
...winner will overpay. Overpaying is a major symptom of show-business fever. Whatever the wishful rationalization of the day -- magazines and cable TV need the synergy of movies and records (Time and Warner, 1989); hardware needs software (Sony and Matsushita buying Columbia Pictures and MCA/Universal, 1990-91); the information superhighway needs content (everyone, 1993-94) -- it is almost axiomatic that when people come down with show-business fever, they pay a premium of 20% to 40%. QVC and Viacom are each offering nearly $10 billion for Paramount, which is about $3 billion more than the in-house analysis...