Word: warner
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...JUMPING JACK FLASH: PW NewsLine reports that Warner Books must sell 700,000 copies of "Jack: Straight from the Gut," Jack Welch's autobiography, in order to earn out the $7 million advance. 500,000 copies have been sold thus...
...other words, we have a new (and French) vertically integrated media behemoth. The small group of big companies - AOL Time Warner, Disney, Fox - fighting not only to produce but deliver their sports, music, movies, TV shows and "interactive programming" to the U.S. couch potatoes that love them has a new member. Just a year after swallowing Universal Studios (and its theme parks), the former French water utility now figures it's ready to, in the words of former Fox TV creator Diller, "compete in the first tier of entertainment...
...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 of the current...
...What do U.S. couch potatoes get, besides the five extra channels of Baywatch reruns and "The Mummy Returns"? Well, maybe a wake-up call for the cable guy. Vertically unchallenged AOL, for instance, might hurry up with long-promised goodies like (Warner Brothers) movies on demand (in Time Warner cable homes). Or Cablevision, which raised rates in suburban New York by 12 percent last year alone, might slow down on the price hikes. Or they might both sic their lobbyists on Washington - Murdoch will come along for the ride - and bust up the EchoStar-DirecTV union, putting satellite TV back...
Gerald Levin's carefully laid plans for filling his shoes almost fell apart last May. Richard Parsons, one of Levin's two deputies and the man he wanted to succeed him as CEO of AOL Time Warner, was being avidly recruited to be CEO of food-and-tobacco giant Philip Morris. In a car ride back from a corporate retreat at the Hilton Rye Town, in the New York City suburbs, Levin urged his protege to stay...