can you say "empty suit?"
Posted on 09/02/2003 10:00:48 PM PDT by RatherBiased.com
Gore Ogles Cable in Vivendi Stable as His Media Buy
by Joe Hagan
Will the proposed merger of NBC and Vivendi Universal Entertainment, announced on Tuesday, Sept. 2, benefit the political-counterprogramming media dream of Al Gore?
The Observer has learned that the former Vice President and his business partner, the entrepreneur and former Democratic fund-raiser Joel Hyatt—who both have been quietly sussing out the creation of a cable-TV network for the last year—called a meeting with executives of Universal Television Group early this summer to discuss buying Newsworld International, a tiny cable news channel owned by Universal.
Sources familiar with the situation said the property might be up for grabs now that French-owned Vivendi Universal has embarked on a deal with NBC to merge its Universal Television Group properties. A source who spoke with The Observer on the condition of anonymity said another buyer or partner was also vying for the property.
NWI is part of the proposed NBC–Vivendi Universal Entertainment merger deal, said a spokesperson for Vivendi Universal.
According to sources familiar with the situation, Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt met with Universal Television chairman Michael Jackson, president of network enterprises Patrick Vien and Vivendi Universal’s chief operating officer, Jean-Bernard Levy. Both Mr. Jackson and Mr. Vien declined to comment on the meeting. Reached for comment, Mr. Hyatt would neither confirm nor deny interest in NWI, but he did criticize the media for not waiting until he had an announcement to make.
It was unclear how the venture would be financed, but in June the media investor and politically active fund-raiser Steve Rattner, head of the Quadrangle Group in New York, was reported to be working with the group in lining up capital.
Until now, NWI has been a snoozy little digital channel that exists in about 20 million homes, pumping out "foreign newscasts originally broadcast in countries such as Germany, Japan, Canada and the European Community"—most of them from CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Company.
Theoretically, Mr. Gore and Co. could gut the channel for its bandwidth and reformat it for their own purposes. Interestingly, a source familiar with the situation said that Barry Diller, who sold the property to Universal, originally planned to transform NWI into something else himself—a hipper, edgier news channel that could be an non-ideological answer to Fox News. The plan never got off the ground, according to a source.
NWI was originally bundled with a small group of Canadian properties—among them, the arts network Trio—and acquired by Mr. Diller’s USA Networks in 1999 from a group of investors lead by Mr. Vien. Mr. Diller sold his USA cable properties—including namesake USA Network and the Sci-Fi Channel—to Universal in December 2001 for $10 billion.
It’s possible that NWI is one of many prospective deals that the Gore-Hyatt team is looking at. Another possibility: Vivendi could get the green light to sell NWI to Mr. Gore as part of a potential deal with NBC, which until now has not tendered any cash with its partnership offer.
Tonight, find out what’s shaking in the Pacific: Newsworld International presents News from Japan. If Al Gore owned it, would there be footage of former President George H.W. Bush’s 1991 upchuck visit? [NWI, 103, 8:30 p.m.]
Al Gore and Al Franken: dumber and dumbest!
can you say "empty suit?"
Huh? How do you answer what you consider to be an idealogical network with a non-idealogical one?
Same with satellite. I don't see DirecTv or Dish making the bandwidth available for such a channel. There simply isn't any evident demand for it, and bandwidth costs $$.
Michael
1) Half the point of the proposed NBC-Universal merger is that NBC needs more leverage with cable companies, so that they can force local cablecos to carry all their channels, and carry them via contracts that are more profitable for NBC. ("Oh, you won't carry Bravo? Okay, fine, in that case we're yanking CNBC, MSNBC, USA...") The more channels they have, the more muscle they have with the cablecos. So why sell off NWI? Especially when it could so easily be adapted to fit into the NBC News family (as some sort of extension to MSNBC, CNBC or both)? It doesn't make sense.
2) People tend to severely underestimate the amount of money it takes to launch a real news channel these days. CNN was launched on a shoestring, but cable barely existed in 1980, and even then CNN literally came within days of closing down more than once in its first two or three years. By 1996, when Fox and MSNBC came along, it was a whole different world. The only reason MSNBC was able to launch was because they cannibalized an already-existing channel (remember America's Talking?) and were able to split the costs between to giant corporations: GE and Microsoft. And there are many who believe that to this day, the only reason MSNBC "makes money" is because accounting tricks allow GE to use it to amortize the overall costs of running NBC News in general and because Microsoft can lump its share of the costs into "the price of runing MSN.com."
There's no question Fox News makes real money, but again, the amount of money Murdoch (via his own giant megaconglomerate) had to invest was gigantic, especially since he had to buy off cablecos all over the country with ten-year contracts paying THEM to carry FNC, because digital cable didn't really exist back then and it was the only way he could get access to channel slots at all.
NWI, on the other hand, carries essentially ZERO original programming, and suffers from being way out on the digital tier, when it's available at all. (Believe it or not, it really does matter that CNN, Fox and MSNBC are on analog channels - in Manhattan, they're on Channels 10, 46 and 43, respectively - while NWI is up on Channel 103. Viewers spend most of their time flipping around on the "regular" channels below channel 80, and only bounce up to the digital channels when they can't find anything they want to watch on the lower channels.) Even if Gore's little band of lunatics was able to grab the channel, where would they get the money to do anything with it? Look at how much trouble they're having launching their "radio network," and that is NOTHING compared to the logistics and costs of launching a cable TV channel. All you need for a radio network is a single radio studio (and heck, you can RENT that), one or two shows to start out with that probably wouldn't need more than five or six staffers each, and a satellite transponder; from there it's just a matter of convincing enough stations to carry enough individual shows to somehow eke out a profit. To run a TV news channel, however, you need to produce at LEAST 18 hours a day of original, mostly live, programming, which requires millions upon millions of dollars' worth of equipment, an entire building devoted to the purpose, hundreds and hundreds of employees ... where are they going to get that kind of money? And keep on getting it for the four to five years MINIMUM it would take before the channel started turning a profit, even if their business plan worked PERFECTLY?
The obvious answer: They can't, and they aren't. At best, they could turn it into an all-liberal version of what the old America's Talking was - talk radio on TV, produced so cheaply it was embarrassing to watch ... and not many people did. And that was even though America's Talking was not a digital tier channel; it was right there next to ESPN and The History Channel and everything else. MindBender26 appears to have missed the line in the article that mentioned NWI already reaches 20 million homes, but I think the rest of his numbers are about right. GoreTV might get 5,000 to 10,000 viewers in prime time, almost all of whom would be people with little money (hell, most would be virulently anti-capitalist anyway) to which no company would have any desire to advertise. GoreTV would not be able to survive with those numbers, even it was a bare-bones, all-talk network.
No, what channel is it on? Iron Chef is a little like that, only in a giant kitchen theater. "Today featuled ingledient - lock robster!" Chichisan.
Michael
That's the way these guys think. They rely on the sheeple's inattention to reality.
Michael
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