Word: viacom
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...tinkered with the hallowed Yankee name). Or maybe the Angels faithful know that despite the garbled name, with Moreno they still have it good. In building Outdoor Systems, a small outfit based in Phoenix, Ariz., into the country's largest billboard-advertising company, which Infinity (now part of Viacom) swallowed for $8.3 billion in 1999, Moreno, 58, has been guided by a basic mantra: "When you take a risk, you're either thinking you're real smart or you're real dumb." Moreno is feeling pretty bright right now as he moves to expand the Angels brand throughout...
Sirius and its bigger satellite competitor XM are death stars to the broadcast-radio industry. Since 1996 companies such as Clear Channel and Infinity (part of Viacom) have taken advantage of deregulation to buy hundreds of stations with the idea of bringing scale--and higher ad prices--to the airwaves. For a while it worked, as industry revenues rose at a double-digit clip during the late '90s ad boom and stations racked up profits thanks to cost cutting. But for listeners, that consolidation brought homogeneity, as corporate playlists suffocated local jocks, and ever more ads were jammed into each...
...clearly has momentum, but broadcast, or terrestrial, radio still owns most of the market. Local radio may be clogged with ads and promos, banal chatter and the same 200 songs spun ad nauseam, but almost everyone tunes in at some point during the week, according to ratings firm Arbitron. Viacom recently wrote down the value of its Infinity radio business by $10.9 billion, but terrestrial radio still hauls in around $20 billion a year in revenues, mainly from local advertisers like car dealers and banks, rendering it an important marketing tool and generator of free cash flow. Sirius, in contrast...
...Entertainment Tracking System--it sounds like something the Pentagon would have if we had fought a war to depose Viacom's Sumner Redstone instead of Saddam Hussein. And in a way, the ETS is the nerve center of a war: the War on Indecency. It is a war that had a shot seen round the world--Janet Jackson at the 2004 Super Bowl--but had been simmering much longer. It is a war with strange allies and enemies: it pits free-market conservatives against family-values conservatives, free-speech liberals against Big Government liberals, and a normally pro-business Congress...
...Redstone and Viacom's stockholders won't be laughing if Freston and Brad Grey--the former agent (for Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, among others) and packager (The Sopranos) who was recently chosen to run Paramount--don't rejuvenate the moribund movie division. Sherry Lansing, Grey's predecessor, had a nice run of Oscar-winning blockbusters: Forrest Gump, Braveheart and a sea story called Titanic. But the past few years have been strewn with pricey duds, mostly aimed at adults. In a business where about 40% of the audience is under 25, you don't make movies for your friends...