Word: vivendi
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...former French utility company, Vivendi Universal, has paid $10.3 billion for the entertainment assets of USA Networks, hired Barry Diller to run them, and then bought 10 percent of EchoStar-Hughes to get those entertainments coursing over five Universal channels into some 16 million U.S. homes...
...they're going to try to do it with satellite. Why? Vivendi chairman Jean-Marie Messier settled on EchoStar-Hughes (which owns DirecTV) for the same reason Rupert Murdoch wanted Hughes before EchoStar moved in. Most of the nation's cable lines are in the hands of rivals like AOL Time Warner (parent company of this writer) and half-rivals like AT&T Broadband and Comcast who have plenty of content-distribution deals already inked - making reasonably priced access via cable into the U.S. couch-potato market hard to find. Making EchoStar-DirecTV and its control of 90 percent...
...Besides, Vivendi, like News Corp. (which dominates satellite in Europe and China), hails from a part of the world where owning cable lines doesn't seem so important. Right-out-of-the-box satellite is getting a fast start in the infrastructure-deprived Third World, and only half of European households are wired for cable - with most of the wiring on the Continent yet to be upgraded to carry the broadband content that movies-on-demand dreamers are waiting for. In the U.S., meanwhile, a full 90 percent of homes are wired for cable, and as for broadband capability...
...EchoStar has a cozy content provider/programming partner, something it said it was having trouble finding (for the same reasons as Vivendi was having trouble getting on cable systems) with a big library, and an extra $1.5 billion to help the war of attrition against cable. Vivendi, for only $1.5 billion (a heck of a lot less than, say, AT&T Broadband and its 18 million homes are going for these days), gets a direct pipeline into 16 million U.S. homes (6 million, if the EchoStar- DirecTV deal gets spiked) with none of the hassles of actually owning things like cables...
...them. In 1996, Hamas unleashed a wave of deadly bombings that killed 60 Israelis in eight days, prompting Arafat to clamp down heavily - some 1,000 Palestinians were arrested and the PA even ousted Hamas from some of its mosques. Later, the organizations appear to have negotiated a modus vivendi. While Hamas won't abandon terrorist actions against Israel, it has periodically agreed, for example, to refrain from sending suicide bombers into Israel for defined periods. While it refuses to accept the PA as an authority, it does accept Arafat's right to represent the Palestinian people internationally...