Word: vivendi
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...French are very different from you and me. Except for former Vivendi Universal chair Jean-Marie Messier. He wanted to be just like a high-flying American CEO, and that (along, of course, with a 70 percent drop in the price of the company's stock since the beginning of this year) is what got him in trouble with his board and the French people. His forced resignation Tuesday sent shock waves throughout markets on both sides of the Atlantic. Shares in Vivendi fell as much as 40 percent on the Paris Stock Exchange that day as Le Monde questioned...
...parent company into bankruptcy, and buzzards from four continents have converged--among them Bertelsmann, Liberty Media, News Corp. and Sony--to pick at the carcass. In Italy, where stealing satellite service is pursued with the same ingenuity and gusto as is tax avoidance, two competing pay-TV services, Vivendi's Telepiu and News Corp.'s Stream, have fared so poorly that they have had little choice but to combine their 2.3 million subscribers. Two struggling Spanish providers of pay TV by satellite, SogeCable and Via Digital, are headed down the same path...
...voting shares and controls the company as its chairman. Liberty owns the Starz and Encore premium movie channels, plus 50% of Discovery Communications (which includes Discovery, Animal Planet, Learning and Travel channels) and 43% of the home-shopping channel QVC. In addition, it holds valuable stakes in Vivendi (3%), News Corp. (18%), USA Interactive (20%) and AOL Time Warner (4%), the parent company of this magazine. Liberty also invests in cable and programming companies in Latin America and Japan, where its Jupiter Communications is the largest cable provider (though still a money loser...
About 30% of Western European homes have cable, compared with 68% in the U.S., and powerful satellite players like News Corp.'s BSkyB and Vivendi's Canal Plus feed signals to 20% of the Continent's TV sets. Gross margins in the cable business hover at about 12%--about a quarter of those in the U.S.--and subscribers outside the U.K. bring in only $13 a month in revenue...
...Music Group, calls Pressplay "an exercise in trying to understand what's going on." There may be plenty of money to be made from selling raw MP3s and unlimited CD-burning privileges. But with major media companies so wedded to the old ways of selling music--nearly 40% of Vivendi's operating income flows from its media business--allowing users to burn from their catalog seems akin to dragging a large wooden horse into their boardroom...