John Malone has stepped down from his role as director emeritus on the Charter Communications board, citing concerns that his simultaneous presence on Warner Bros. Discovery's board of directors violates the Clayton Act. 

“I stepped away from my director emeritus role at Charter due to the uncertainty around Clayton Act inquiries,” Malone said in a statement. “I remain heavily invested in Charter via Liberty Broadband — which maintains its three board seats — and am confident in Charter’s leadership team and strategy for the business.” 

Malone had held the director emeritus position since 2018, when he retired from a full-time director role. 

Malone's move comes after Steven Miron and Steven Newhouse, two other executives who simultaneously occupied Charter and WBD board seats, came under Justice Department scrutiny for possible violations of the Clayton Antitrust Act. The 1914 law was designed to curtail conflicts of interest arising from board members serving two competing companies at once. 

Both Miron and Newhouse resigned from the WBD board earlier this month.  

“Charter, through its Spectrum cable service, and WBD, including through its Max streaming subscription services, both provide video distribution services to customers,” the DOJ said in a statement. 

The news was originally reported by Cablefax.

DENVER — In 60 years working across the technology-media-telecom industries, mogul John Malone has weathered a few global economic storms.

Appearing virtually for a fireside chat during the opening session Tuesday at SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, his interviewer, Mike Fries, who runs Malone’s European cable conglomerate, Liberty Global, asked him if he sees any clouds coming up on the horizon for the cable industry. 

How bad could things get? Think Sebastian Junger’s 1997 nonfiction bestseller The Perfect Storm.

“Are we headed into the third world war in a greatly weakened position as a country and as a west?” Malone said. “There are a lot of things to worry about right now when it comes to global stability.” 

Beyond a possible invasion of Taiwan by China, which would badly disrupt the global semiconductor industry, there are threats to world order, he noted, with Russia's ongoing attack on Ukraine and the renewed Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza ramping up global tensions. 

Tipping off his Libertarian sensibilities not so subtly, Malone said there’s the prospect of former President Donald Trump’s 2017 corporate tax break expiring in 2025 with little prospect of a Democratic-led Congress voting to renew it. 

Meanwhile, the resurrection of net neutrality talk in the FCC, Malone said, threatens to further cement “monopoly control" of TMT in the hands of the “tech giants,” further relegating cable providers into a position they've tried to thwart off for decades — simply as operators of “dumb pipes.” 

But all is not bleak for the cable industry in Malone's forward-looking view. 

He lauded decisions by Comcast and Charter to utilize legacy hybrid fiber-coax infrastructure for their next-generation 10G networks. This enabled both companies to get to market with multi-gig services faster and more efficiently. 

“They can always add fiber as they go,” he said. 

Malone also complimented the recent program licensing renewal deal negotiated between Disney and Charter. 

“I was happy to see it,” he said. “It allows cable to start selling hybrid video services, mixtures of of streaming and linear. That will prolong the life of linear and continue that revenue stream. It will also slow down the transition of big tech becoming the primary provider of entertainment.”

To close the virtual fireside chat, Fries engaged his boss in a “lighting round” of questions that required one-word answers

Will Disney still own ESPN in five years? “No.”

Who are you a longtime buyer of, Apple or Google? “Google.”

Yes or no, the government wins its antitrust cast against Google? “There will be a settlement.”

The IPO market comes back in 2024 or 2025? “24.”

Yellowstone or Ted Lasso? “Ted Lasso.”

Cable's most exciting decade, in the past or the future. “Future.”

The great political sage (and former Texas agriculture commissioner) Jim Hightower once said, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” A progressive Democrat in a state that was rapidly turning hard-red Republican, Hightower knew whereof he spoke. 

And yet, that’s exactly where CNN sits, alongside stinky armored not-rats and sun-blasted paint, trying to find a durable and lucrative audience amid a serious ratings swoon, while also attempting to avoid that speeding semi-truck called industry-wide transformation. Short-term decisions made for financial exigencies may already be having long-term consequences. Like a five-day-old dead armadillo, CNN is starting to smell a little. 

A year after changing corporate daddies to Warner Bros. Discovery and division leadership to Chris Licht, it’s fair to wonder where the preeminent TV news brand is headed. 

As CNN showed in the early days of the Ukraine invasion, it still had the reach and bench of talented correspondents last year to thoroughly cover a big international story from multiple angles. None, and I repeat none, of its broadcast and cable competitors marshaled the same resources in such a comprehensive way. The only news organizations with anything like CNN’s global credibility are the surging The New York Times and a fading BBC. 

Its online site, CNN.com, has been a semi-secret powerhouse too. It trails only the Times and, still somehow, Yahoo.com among the top U.S. news-publishing sites, according to SimilarWeb.com. 

CNN.com had 1.78 billion visits over the past three month, with two-thirds on mobile, which made it the 34th-most popular site in the U.S. and 88th biggest on the planet, said SimilarWeb. That makes the website a force multiplier for the cable network, expanding its reach, reputation and revenue generation, especially during high-profile news cycles.  

CNN.com traffic remains nearly double FoxNews.com (No. 119 globally, 997 million visitors past three months) and miles beyond digital afterthought MSNBC (No. 4,769 globally, 55 million visits).  

Where CNN is not ahead is in, um, cable news. 

Back when the Warner Bros. Discovery deal was aborning in late 2021, power-behind-the-throne and future WBD board member John Malone said he hoped CNN would get back to doing journalism. 

That was a shot, ultimately, at all three cable news networks and their Trump-era obsessions with political divisions, partisan personalities and endless hot takes. Last summer, Malone took his journalism critique a bit further, telling the New York Times he hoped the news networks would do a better job distinguishing between news and opinion.

CEO David Zaslav and Licht duly tacked to the center. Company executives have made much of the number of Republican politicians and other conservative commentators they’ve had on air in recent months. The big-name/big-polarization personalities of primetime are largely gone. 

Licht, meanwhile, has been trying to turn the morning newscast into something more like the personality-driven Morning Joe on MSNBC or CBS This Morning, both of which Licht previously headed. 

He installed former primetime star Don Lemon into CNN This Morning with Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins. The initial product did not thrive, especially after the run-and-gun Lemon said GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley was not “in her prime,” among other on-air gaffes and off-air conflicts with co-hosts. That fueled an Oscar-night rebuke from Michelle Yeoh and a time-out for “training” for Lemon. 

Morning ratings, meanwhile, have been brutal: 360,000 total viewers/just 73,000 in the demo, versus Fox News’ 1.2 million total/170,000 in the demo. In response, two weeks ago, Licht swapped in new executive producers Laura Mensch and Chris Russell to stanch the stench. 

Licht is also unveiling a new midday news block, CNN News Central, that debuts beginning this week. Two three-hour blocks of midday programming will emanate from New York and Washington, with new sets and a graphics-heavy look designed to evoke election-night bells and whistles. 

And the suddenly personality-free primetime is being filled with one-off Town Hall programming and extended interviews. 

So, big changes all the way around. 

But there in the middle of the road, the company has mostly discovered the previously mentioned stiffening Cingulata and yellow stripes, but not much in the way of actual viewers. 

Primetime ratings are down 61% this month, Nielsen says, and in the prized 18-49 demographic, the audience is down 40% over the past year. 

That’s the worst of the Big Three, at a time when it’s tough to be a cable network, or a news operation in a non-campaign year. Cord-cutting across the industry whacks the big players such as CNN and ESPN worst because they make the most from both advertising and carriage fees. But bad numbers are bad numbers, and CNN is delivering a lot of bad numbers. 

A company spokesman told the New York Post that CNN viewers are the youngest of the Big Three and the most in the demo that advertisers covet. Most importantly, “the impact of CNN’s journalism and the reach of the brand cannot be measured by a single metric.” 

For his part, Zaslav told folks to perk up in a pep talk reported by the Post. 

“Ratings be damned,” Zaslav said. “Let’s focus on who we are. This is our mission. This is our legacy. And this is our journey together.”

But the journey Zaslav has taken CNN’s remaining viewership and staff on has been quite a rough one, with a deeply problematic potential legacy that may manifest for years to come.   

CNN lost hundreds of employees when Zaslav took over, in part because of his immediate closure of the newborn CNN Plus streaming service. WBD executives also closed CNN’s original-production division, which made documentaries, series and other projects. 

Those moves may have made sense given WBD’s crippling $55 billion in debt (now hacked to a still brutal $48 billion). But they don’t position CNN to thrive in a post-cable future. 

Subscription service CNN Plus was supposed to be the future as cable TV continued to shrivel. Whether a stand-alone niche service, particularly at the mammoth scale that launched CNN Plus, could reach sustainability is a reasonable question to ask. 

So, maybe something like CNN Plus won’t ever make sense as a replacement for the cable network. What then?

Will live CNN news programming join HBO Max, just as Discovery Plus content is doing, to create a somewhat undersized analogue for the traditional cable bundle? 

Live network news programming from NBC and CBS is already part of Peacock and Paramount Plus, respectively. Maybe that’s the next step, but will it generate the resources needed to sustain CNN operations, and at what subscription price? 

Similarly, the decision to ax CNN’s original production unit clearly saved money. But if Zaslav wants to generate more cash by selling programming to third-party outlets, it won’t be coming from CNN, whose documentaries, films and specials might otherwise continue to be attractive, award-winning, audience favorites. 

Great journalism is expensive, the opposite of evergreen, and sometimes dangerous, as demonstrated by this week’s seizure of The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich by the Russian government for, basically, being an American reporter in wartime. 

But CNN matters. In its four decades of operation, the network has been an important source of reliable, in-the-moment coverage of major events in the U.S. and far beyond. It would be heartening to see Zaslav and Licht demonstrate a deeper appreciation for the public trust and irreplaceable asset they’ve been gifted to run, and to make sure it’s positioned to thrive for decades to come. ■

TMT tycoon John Malone and several former colleagues on the Charter Communications board of directors have agreed to pay $87.5 million to settle a 6-year-old investor lawsuit tied to the $78.7 billion purchase of Time Warner Cable by Charter in 2015.

Investor Matthew Sciabacucchi sued Malone, along with Gregory Maffei and former Charter CEO and Chairman Tom Rutledge, among several others, claiming they “received unfair tax benefits” through a “side deal” carved out amid the merger. 

At the time of the TWC purchase, Malone’s Liberty Media was Charter’s largest shareholder, controlling 26% of stock. The suit said Malone and the rest of the defendants received an all-stock consideration in shares Liberty held in TWC, while other investors received a mix of stock and cash. 

The suit was filed back in February 2017 in Delaware. (You can read it here.)

Bloomberg was the first to report on the settlement. 

For their part, the defendants don't admit wrongdoing and claim they settled the complaint to “avoid the burden, expense, disruption, and distraction of further litigation.” 

The settlement money will actually go to Charter, which the suit alleges was unfairly compensated. ■

Those crazy guys over at Warner Bros. Discovery have been out and about a lot lately, talking up company prospects at investor events on multiple continents this past week. The thing is, the more the company’s top leadership talks about streaming, the more I keep wondering why they’re still in it. 

As John Malone, the power behind the throne on WBD’s board of directors, put it at Liberty Media’s Investor Day last week: “At the moment, there’s a lot of blood flowing down the gutters, of people who are streaming, and some can afford it and some cannot.”

The point is, WBD might be one of the “cannots.”

WBD just reported that its combined streaming operations have nearly 95 million subscribers. That sounds like a lot, but it’s a small share of the globe’s streaming households, with some limits on where HBO Max can expand given other deals. And that modest number (it grew by 2 million last quarter) is spread across HBO Max, Discovery Plus and assorted odds and ends. 

At some point next spring, WBD’s two main services will merge into one, CEO David Zaslav finally confirmed. That such a union would finally come roughly a year after WarnerMedia and Discovery Media merged, and close to two years after the corporate marriage was first announced, it begs the question of “what’s taking so long?” 

Merging the two services certainly shotguns together two very different audiences: the coast-hugging, critic-driven fans of HBO’s edgy, expensive fare versus the downscale delights of dirt-cheap unscripted shows on D+. Can these audiences get along any better than, say, the U.S. House of Representatives? 

Almost certainly. 

Zaslav said during an investor day appearance that programming from D+ superstars Chip and Joanna Gaines had done well on HBO Max. Shows such as Property Brothers, Fixer Upper The Castle and The Craftsman are showing up on both services without incident. Probably other unscripted content that Discovery churns out would be just as successful on the Max were it there alongside Euphoria, Rap Shit, The White Lotus and The Sex Lives of College Girls.

Given that, why wait until spring? 

LightShed Partners Rich Greenfield wondered in a note this week why Zaslav hasn’t extended his zeal for rooting out excess costs to killing off Discovery Plus. Yes, it’s basically a regurgitation of Discovery’s basic cable programming, but why keep paying for separate marketing, operations, customer service and other costs any longer than you have to? 

Zaslav seemed to rationalize the separate services by saying D+ subscribers turn it on while cooking, doing Zoom calls (what?), helping kids with the homework as background noise. 

While that’s certainly a use case, the same viewer service could be reliably achieved by creating a Discovery hub on HBO Max. And then you’d actually begin creating a service that people will watch all of the time, optimizing engagement and building stickiness in an increasingly competitive market. 

“There is clear and compelling logic to combining Discovery Plus and HBO Max,” Greenfield wrote. “EVERY streaming service should be centered on optimizing for time spent to drive down churn and increase pricing power.”

This matters even more for HBO Max’s ad-supported version, and for any AVOD/FAST service that Zaslav might create.

But while delaying that services merger four to six months is a head scratcher, the bigger puzzler might be why WBD is continuing to operate any streaming service in its current condition? 

While HBO Max is still studded with massive HBO hits such as House of Dragons, WBD is otherwise disinvesting in its streaming bell cow. Straight-to-streaming movies are done, the unit creating original programming has been gutted and even originals programming from legacy divisions such as CNN and Warner’s movie division are getting slashed. 

Zaslav rightfully brags about the fine programs WBD makes for other companies, such as The Sandman for Netflix, two-time Emmy Best Comedy winner Ted Lasso for Apple TV Plus, and Abbott Elementary for ABC (and Hulu). 

Great. As he mentions, being an arms dealer is “a very good business. There’s a lot of bidders for the content.” 

What’s less clear is how the company decides what to keep as its services are getting de-emphasized, and what to sell, particularly with money so tight (the company still has $48 billion in debt). 

CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels told a Morgan Stanley investor conference in Europe that the company is trying to eliminate consumer barriers to accessing content, whether it’s through a company app, through Amazon, or linear TV.

“We’re going to be open to all those forms of distribution…to get the best return for every dollar of content spend,” he said. That’s great as long as you’re getting people to spend more than it costs you to get it to them.

Zaslav also foreshadowed WBD’s likely withdrawal from the business of showing NBA games. Contract renewals are due in a couple of years and almost certainly will be crazy expensive, based on what’s happening already with other sports. Malone called those escalating prices,  “a tax on the public,” and “prohibitively expensive.” 

When it comes time to renew, Zaslav said the company would be  “very disciplined. We don’t have to have the NBA. If we do a deal on the NBA, it’s going to look a lot different … There’s an argument why — you could put the NBA on HBO Max. You could throw in Bleacher Report, House of Highlights, all of our production. That could be a hell of a good hand. But I think you’ll see us being very, very disciplined on sport. We have enough without doing a new deal with anybody. I’d like to do a deal with the NBA, but we’re going to have to be — it has to be a deal for the future. It can’t be a deal for the past.”

HBO Max’s real problem is that it isn’t big enough to justify putting games there. For that matter, the economics don’t appear sustainable with other parts of WBD’s streaming operations, either. It continues to be what the analysts like to call “sub-scale,” with little real prospect get big enough to truly compete with Apple, Amazon and Disney. 

The company is trying to build a direct-to-consumer ecosystem that won’t simultaneously cannibalize its legacy distribution relationships, Malone said. 

It’s an admirable goal, but hugely challenging in the kind of headwinds WBD faces. Can Zaslav and Wiedenfels find the resources to improve access everywhere in a difficult economy, stout competition, and disinvestment/consolidation in streaming? 

Or should they consider getting out of streaming altogether, focus on a Sony-style approach of selling great content to the highest bidder, while keeping costs as low as possible? That would allow the company to pay down its crushing debt, pretty up its balance sheet, and prepare everyone for the inevitable next mega merger/sale to come as soon as possibly 2024.

As Elon Musk, now transparent down to whatever he did in the last 299 seconds, desperately summoned back from the firing line Thursday evening the guy who used to handle the employee badges ... so that everyone who was still around could get back into Twitter HQ, a maudlin mood overtook social media. 

From Mark Hamill to Keith Olbermann, the platform's greatest glitterati openly pondered whether the tweet you were now reading could be the last from them you ever saw.

In her own 10-tweet platform retrospective, tech journo luminary Kara Swisher -- perhaps the new Twitter owner's most vociferous critic among legions -- crafted a rather elegant retrospective on what the Twitter has meant to her personally (turns out she met her wife via DMs) ... and more pointedly, explore the mystery as to why on Earth Musk has chosen to spend $44 billion ... this way.

This tweet from Swisher actually brought peace to Next TV's perpetually anxious heart. 

We can't know exactly why nincompoops seem to perpetually end up making key decisions for the key communications platforms on which we all spend our remaining hours. And we can't always be sure of their motives. But it sure helps to define the spectrum. 

Skis it is. 

And here are some others in the TMT business who are also over theirs ... and a few who had a pretty smooth ride last week. 

PROMOTE

* Taylor Sheridan - The producer has now officially expanded to the point at which Paramount marketing operatives use the word "universe" to flavor the executive quotes in press releases to describe his collective work. 

We won't be surprised if Sheridan surfaces with his own line item at Paramount Global's Q4 earnings. 

Dude had a heck of a Sunday, for sure. 

Season 5 of his first big breakout series, Yellowstone, captured what research company Samba TV described as the biggest scripted series premiere of 2022, delivering a live + same day audience (Nielsen's numbers) of 12.1 viewers across the Paramount Network, CMT, TV Land and Pop.

Meanwhile, over in streaming, the premiere of Sheridan's latest show, Tulsa King starring Sylvester Stallone, led the 21-month-old Paramount Plus to its biggest signup day ever (Paramount didn't disclose any specific numbers).

Sheridan's Hollywood success story has been told a bunch already. But since Blue State-centric Next TV got hooked on Yellowstone just the other day after finally deciding to watch season 1, episode 1, we found it worth reinventing the wheel. A decade ago, the guy was an actor, his by-the-book deputy role of David Hale on Sons of Anarchy killed off amid Kurt Sutter's impulsive whims. 

Disney ended up offing Sutter for real after the Fox purchase and now pours residual tribute over his professional grave for all those motorcycle gang shows. And 52-year-old Sheridan, still armed with the angular cheekbones of a journeyman actor, reinvented himself as perhaps the most prolific, influential and successful TV writer outside of Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy. 

* Neville Ray - In what appears to be a recession, fixed wireless access might be the most exciting new technology few of us are talking about. For $50 a month, T-Mobile will pipe 5G internet into your home. You can position the gateway into any room you see fit, sans cables, provided you get decent radio reception. 

No contracts. No hidden fees. 

Our cable operator, Charter, keeps telling Next TV that we won't like the performance we'll get next month when the world slows down a little and we have time to make this switch. 

According to a new study of home broadband performance conducted by Opensignal and published this past week, it's true -- we're not going to see quite as much downstream speed when we try to catch-up binge on Yellowstone this weekend ... and watch our No. 7 Trojans vanquish the Gutty Little Bruins of UCLA. 

But it looks good enough for the money. 

For T-Mobile, 578,000 customers were added to its 5G Home Internet FWA service in the third quarter alone. And the service's base has quickly swollen to more than 2.1 million users. As Leichtman Research Group's latest quarterly broadband report this week showed, FWA is now driving the U.S. home internet business, seizing control from the cable industry. 

What blew our mind was learning this week that the FWA model is based on spare wireless spectrum that's not needed for the mobile internet. T-Mobile CEO Ray described this "fallow capacity" model at the Morgan Stanley European Technology, Media & Telecom Conference earlier this week. 

“The incremental cost of serving those customers is de minimis," Ray said. "And why would you sit on your hands on all of that capacity that you have no utilization for or line of sight to use? So, we've created a huge business in the space, which is just -- it's gone way better than we'd anticipated.”

Relegate

* John Malone - A little over six months after the cable titan orchestrated the big $43 billion spinoff of Warner Bros. and merger with Discovery, the investment community has already started wondering if this a leveraged buyout "gone bad." 

At Liberty Media's investor day this week, Malone said he still has confidence in the management team led by David Zaslav, despite the halving of share price since April.

We already took down another one of Malone's guys -- CNN chief Chris Licht -- in the inaugural iteration of this column last week. And we've been beating our empty suit drum on Zaslav for months, noting that his core strategies of blaming his predecessors for overspending on HBO Max while retreating to tapped-out linear formats doesn't seem like a good one. 

This week, Zaslav doubled down on the Jason Kilar hate while speaking at RBC’s Global TIMT Conference in New York. We found his headline-grabbing comparison of the pre-MAX, 2019-era standalone HBO to the Kilar-expanded HBO Max to be of misleading apples-vs.-oranges variety. 

We also found it misleading that he keeps describing Kilar's one-time/one-year strategy of releasing the 2021 Warner Bros. movie slate day-and-date on HBO Max as a permanent and disastrous policy error he -- and only he alone -- can fix. 

Curmudgeonly, contrarian -- and somewhat self-satisfied -- media journalists playing in major league ballparks agree with us. 

 Just weeks after Charter Communications slashed prices for its Spectrum Mobile offering to $29.99 per month, chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge said charges for wireless cable offerings could drop further as the cost to provide service continues to decline.

“I think the mobile opportunity is very similar to the wireline opportunity that existed 15 years ago,” Rutledge said at the virtual/in-person Liberty Media Investor Day in New York. “Look at what happened there — we had a high-priced wireline phone service — in the metro area here, it was about $72 a month. That product now is less than $15 a month. And the biggest wireline phone companies in America are Comcast and Charter. So, I think the opportunity in mobile is similar. It’s got its own complexities, but the opportunity is there to create value for consumers. Consumers actually save money and we make money. That’s a pretty attractive business model that is available to us. And yeah, I think it leads toward convergence.” 

Charter introduced its $29.99 price point — for a minimum of two lines each — in October, a big discount from its previous charge of $45 per month, per line. That price reduction came on the heels of Comcast introducing a $30 per line service (for a minimum of four lines) which took effect in April. 

In a research note, Bernstein media analyst Peter Supino wrote that Rutledge’s comments provided “a muscular reminder of Charter’s ambitions and competitive advantages.” 

“Charter will sell wireless as aggressively as necessary to ensure that it achieves growth of customers and EBITDA per customer,” Supino added.

Also: Analyst Says It’s Time to Take Cable Wireless Seriously

Liberty Media chairman John Malone said that while convergence of fixed and wireless assets is common in Europe, where Liberty, a major Charter shareholder, has substantial holdings, it hasn’t yet taken hold in the U.S. While European companies have made bigger strides in deploying fiber networks compared to their U.S. counterparts, Malone stressed that every company and every market is different. 

“I’d start by reminding everybody that Europe is largely converged, the broadband companies are also wireless companies,” Malone said at the Investor Day. “That’s been true in every market we’re still operating in. In terms of technology, existing network structure, the nature of technological upgrade, the pressure from competition, etc. Every market is different.”

Malone added that in the U.K. for example, Liberty overbuilt itself with fiber, initially to capture more B2B business and because it was relatively cheap to build. The U.K., he said, also is relatively underbuilt — there isn’t a lot of fiber capacity and areas will be built out as opportunities present themselves. In the U.S., Malone said the biggest area for growth could be in boosting upstream capacity. 

“That may be more of a political reality than a business reality in the near term,” Malone said.  “And the cable industry contemplated that, and does have the capability of vastly expanding the upstream capacity.”

Malone said outside of the U.S., there has been a movement toward collectively building networks.

“In some places there is only one fiber backbone network that will be built and everyone will share and use it. So the models vary and in each location it depends on capital efficiency, the current state of play, cooperation between multiple players. It’s not uncommon. For instance in the U.K. there are four meaningful cell phone providers but only two networks, and those four competitors share  those two 2 nets as a matter of capital efficiency.”

Liberty CEO Greg Maffei added that the path U.S. cable companies have taken by upgrading using DOCSIS and other technologies to boost capacity and efficiency gives them some leeway before having to decide whether to go deeper into fiber expansion.     

“It’s a long ride for U.S. cable,” Maffei said. ■ 

John Rigas, the founder and former chairman and CEO of Adelphia Communications who was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison after a massive fraud scheme that afflicted the company over decades, died in Coudersport, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 30. He was 96 years old.

Rigas was the epitome of the bootstrapping cable executive, founding Adelphia in 1952 with his brother, Gus, with a $300 loan and eventually growing the company to the sixth-largest cable operator in the country with 5.5 million subscribers.

Rigas reveled in his rags-to-riches story and he often spoke of growing up in an apartment over his Greek immigrant parents’ diner (Texas Hot) in Wells, N.Y., and how he often slept in the Coudersport movie theater that was his first business venture. While he grew Adelphia mainly by acquisition — he famously paid the highest multiple ever (at the time) for a cable company, Daniels & Associates‘ Carlsbad, California, system in the early days — his empire came crashing down in 2004, when federal prosecutors claimed he and his family took from publicly traded Adelphia billions of dollars for their own personal use. 

Cable's Rock of Ages: Coudersport's Rigases

John Rigas was convicted of 18 counts of fraud and conspiracy in July 2004 and sentenced to 15 years in prison. His son, Adelphia chief financial officer Timothy Rigas, was convicted on 18 counts of fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to 20 years. John Rigas was released from federal prison in 2016 after serving nearly 10 years, when a judge ordered his compassionate early release after it was thought he had about six months to live. Rigas had earlier been diagnosed with Stage IV bladder cancer.

Timothy Rigas was released in 2019 after serving about 12 years of a 17-year sentence (reduced from 20 years in 2008), part of the federal First Step Act which allows for the early release of inmates convicted of nonviolent crimes who have served two-thirds of their sentence and are over the age of 60. Tim Rigas was scheduled to serve the remaining two years of his sentence in home confinement.

A third son, former Adelphia chief operating officer Michael Rigas, was granted a mistrial after jurors could not reach a verdict regarding 15 counts of securities fraud and two counts of bank fraud. He pleaded to a lesser charge of signing false documents and served a two-year sentence under house arrest.

A fourth executive, assistant treasurer Michael Mulcahy, was found not guilty. 

Fall of the House of Rigas: An Adelphia Time Line

The scandal erased more than 50 years of good will the Rigas family built up as it assembled its cable empire and rocked the industry as a whole. Coming at a time when the business world was swept up in off-balance sheet debt issues after the Enron and WorldCom scandals, some major figures, including cable legend John Malone, have said the Rigas family was unfairly treated. Others believed the family reaped what it sowed.

John Rigas continued to maintain his innocence until the day he died. In an interview with USA Today in 2007, he claimed that he could have cut a deal with the federal government by pleading to lesser charges and avoiding jail time, but he refused to plead guilty to something he believed he didn’t do. 

“My legacy is to my grandchildren, and you have to stand up — as difficult as it is — for something. And that is not something to be compromised or amended," Rigas told USA Today in 2007. 

The Rigases were accused of pillaging the company over a span of decades, siphoning money from operations and putting the company on the hook for about $2.3 billion in  off-balance sheet loans. In court documents, prosecutors accused the family of using Adelphia as its “personal piggy bank” and “personal ATM” financing a golf course, luxury condominiums and items as mundane as a $6,000 to fly two Christmas trees from Coudersport to daughter Ellen’s home in New York,  and John Rigas’ Columbia House record club subscription.

Adelphia’s fall began in March 2002 after company executives, during a conference call discussing Q1 results, couldn’t answer questions regarding $2.3 billion in off-balance sheet debt. It was later determined that the Rigases used those loans to buy Adelphia stock, which was used aggressively to buy other cable systems. 

Adelphia was sold in 2006 to Comcast and Time Warner Cable for $17.6 billion in cash and stock. 

Rigas is survived by his sons Timothy, Michael and James (CEO of Zito Media), his daughter Ellen and several grandchildren. His wife Doris predeceased him in 2014. 

Cable mogul and key Discovery shareholder John Malone sees potential deals in the future between Comcast’s NBCUniversal and the combination of WarnerMedia and Discovery as the media business continues to consolidate.

Speaking on CNBC Monday Malone said he’s talked with Comcast CEO Brian Roberts.

“If the regulatory environment permitted, down the road, all kids of relationships could be contemplated between this enterprise that we’re creating and Brian’s enterprise,” Malone said. “I think there are many opportunities for [Warner Media-Discovery] to work with NBCUniversal to develop successful businesses."

Also Read: Discovery-WarnerMedia Deal 'Doesn’t Really Change Much,' Says Bob Chapek

Malone, always looking ahead for another deal, said Roberts wanted Comcast to acquire WarnerMedia, but didn’t want problems with regulators. Regulatory issues made Discovery a good partner for AT&T, which was looking to spin off its media business.

AT&T last week announced a deal to spin off its WarnerMedia unit and combine it with Discovery. 

With the TV business pivoting to streaming, media companies are scrambling for scale. Comcast was outbid for 21st Century Fox when Rupert Murdoch decided to sell his company to the Walt Disney Co. 

And Wall Street was abuzz with rumors and reports that AT&T and Comcast would be better off combining their media businesses than pursuing their strategies of seeking synergy from controlling both content and distribution.

Cable legend John Malone, just days after converting his super-voting shares in Discovery Inc. to common stock for no premium to help facilitate its merger with WarnerMedia, has agreed to sell his Class B shares on TV and online retailer Qurate Retail Group to long-time lieutenant Greg Maffei, for about $400 million in cash or stock.

News of the filing first appeared in The Information. 

Qurate includes the two largest home shopping channels -- QVC and HSN -- as well as online retailer Zulily, Cornerstone Brands and green energy and other investments. .  

Malone, 80, helped found the modern cable business as chairman of Tele-Communications Inc., and has left his mark on practically every major cable deal in the past 20 years. He agreed on May 18 to sell his Qurate super-voting shares, which give him 41% voting rights in the company, to Maffei for $14 per share, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents. Qurate stock currently trades around $13 per share. According to the filing, Malone would get paid in either cash, stock “or such other form of consideration as to which Mr. Maffei and Mr. Malone may mutually agree.”  

Maffei, who is CEO of Liberty Media and chairman of Qurate and several other Liberty holdings, joined Malone in 2005 after stints at Microsoft,  360Networks and Oracle. The two have been partners on several big deals, including the 2013 purchase of a 27% interest in Charter Communications. 

According to the SEC document, Malone agreed to the sale on May 18, pending board approvals. The document added that while he supports Qurate’s long-term strategy, he wanted to accept Maffei's offer “because it would provide flexibility for certain long-term estate and tax planning goals in light of potential changes in federal tax laws.”

The document continued that the sale is contingent on the approval of Qurate’s board of directors. Qurate also has call rights to Malone’s Class B shares, and if the company exercises that right, Malone said he would prefer to receive payment in the form of Qurate common stock, “such that he would continue to hold a substantial investment in Qurate Retail.”

Malone earlier agreed to convert his Class B super-voting shares in Discovery, which usually carry 10 votes each, on a 1:1 basis into common shares for no premium, a move that helped Discovery move forward with its planned merger with WarnerMedia. In a statement after that deal was announced, Malone said that he neither asked for nor received a premium for converting his Discovery stake. 

“I believe we are creating real value for shareholders and a legacy investment for my grandkids,” Malone said in the statement. 

Discovery’s super voting shares usually trade at around the same price of its common stock, but in the past several months, because of a sell-off by hedge fund Archegos Capital (which also shorted ViacomCBS stock), their value has soared. Bloomberg estimated that Discovery’s Class B shares have traded as high as $128 each at one point -- more than four times the Class A share price of around $32 per share. By converting his Class B shares on a one-for-one basis, Bloomberg estimated that Malone could lose about $280 million on the deal. 

That is in contrast to Discovery’s other major holder of super-voting shares -- Advance Publications, controlled by publishing giants the Newhouse family -- which according to Bloomberg will receive 13.1 shares of the new entity for every Class B share they own. Advance also will receive  the right to nominate two board members to the new entity.

Some analysts saw Malone’s Discovery deal as his way of helping to push the transaction forward. And he still will be a large shareholder after the deal closes, meaning he will participate in any upside in the stock price in the new entity. Some have predicted that the new Discovery-WarnerMedia could be valued at as much as $46 per share, well above the current $32 price of the stock on Thursday. 

Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei saw his total compensation rise about 7% in 2020 to $47.1 million from $44 million, fueled mostly by stock awards and other incentive payments, according to the company’s proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission April 14. 

Maffei’s annual base salary fell 27% to $871,880 in 2020, compared to $1.2 million in the prior year, but he received a big bump in his stock awards -- $8.3 million compared to $3.6 million in 2019. Maffei also received $11.3 million in non-equity incentives in 2020, compared to $8.4 million in 2019.

Other Liberty Media executives saw even bigger increases in total compensation. Chief Accounting Officer and Principal Financial Officer Brian Wendling received $2.4 million in total compensation for the year, an 85% increase over the $1.3 million he received in 2019. Chief Corporate Development Officer Albert Rosenthaler received a 45% increase in total compensation to $4.5 million from $2.6 million in the prior year, while Chief Legal Officer Renee Wilm’s total haul stayed constant at $2.9 million for the year.  

Liberty Media chairman John Malone’s total compensation dipped 22% to $1.09 million from $1.4 million in the prior year.  

Liberty Broadband, the tracking stock created by cable legend John Malone’s Liberty Media to mirror its investment in Charter Communications, will begin selling back some of that interest to the cable company, part of an earlier agreement to cap its holdings to 26%, and could use some of the gains for share repurchases, to pay down its own debt or for acquisitions, according to one analyst.

Liberty Broadband was created in 2014, about one year after Liberty Media acquired a 27% interest in Charter for about $95 per share. Charter stock is now trading above $600 per share.

Liberty Broadband’s holdings in Charter have fluctuated as it has bought stock and the cable operator has repurchased its shares over the years. Last year Liberty Broadband said it had a 24.4% stake in Charter. As of Nov. 20, Liberty Broadband said it owned about 51.1 million Charter shares.    

According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Feb. 24, Liberty Broadband and Charter agreed back in 2015 that the former’s interest would not exceed 26%. However, as a result of Charter’s own share repurchase programs, that interest is rising, and Liberty Broadband has agreed to sell Charter shares back to the company on a monthly basis to keep that interest at a constant 26%. Analysts expect Charter to buy back about $10 billion of its own stock in 2021, after repurchasing about $12.1 billion in stock in 2020. But that 2021 estimate could rise as the company did not participate in the federal C-Band wireless auctions, which would free up more capital for buybacks. 

According to the SEC filing, under the agreement, Liberty will sell to Charter, generally on a monthly basis, a number of shares of Charter’s Class A Common stock representing an amount sufficient for LBB’s ownership of Charter to be reduced such that it does not exceed the ownership cap then applicable to LBB under the Stockholders Agreement as Charter reduces outstanding shares through repurchases from time to time.  

In a research note, Evercore ISI Group analyst James Ratcliffe estimated that Liberty Broadband could sell as much as $2.7 billion worth of stock this year back to Charter as part of that agreement. After taxes, the tracker could stand to gain as much as $2.3 billion from the sales.

Ratcliffe wrote in the note to clients that the most likely scenario is that Liberty Broadband will use the proceeds to repurchase its own shares. Second on the list could be M&A, and lastly, it could be used to pay down debt.

In his note, Ratcliffe wrote that if Liberty Broadband went the M&A route, he would "expect any transactions to be in the cable space. We view this as more likely than paying down debt, but less likely than buybacks."  

Liberty Broadband is no stranger to cable deals. In 2017, sister company Liberty Interactive purchased GCI in a deal that valued the Alaskan telecom company at about $1.1 billion  and forming GCI Liberty. After a series of complicated deals, GCI Liberty merged with Liberty Broadband in August.   Liberty Broadband also owns 100% of WiFi mobile positioning and location company Skyhook, which was purchased by Liberty Broadband subsidiary TruePosition in 2014.  In 2016, TruePosition and Skyhook merged under the Skyhook name.  

Liberty Broadband has been a favorite of some analysts who see the shares as a way to own Charter stock more cheaply. Liberty Broadband was priced at $144.25 each in early trading on Feb. 25, while Charter was priced at $616.95 per share.   

While the most recent stock repurchase shouldn’t come as a surprise, Ratcliffe wondered why the parties just didn’t raise the cap on the amount of Charter stock Liberty Broadband can own.    

“We wonder, however, what drove the decision to set up a periodic sale structure, rather than raising the ownership cap,” Ratcliffe wrote. “In particular, was this decision driven from the Charter side (a desire to limit Liberty’s ownership, for governance or tax reasons), or from the Liberty side (a desire to begin to monetize the Charter investment without selling to the public market)? Clearly, this will be a question when Liberty reports earnings tomorrow.”      

Liberty Broadband is scheduled to hold a conference call with analysts to discuss Q4 results on Feb. 26 at 11:15 a.m.

Liberty Global, the Denver-based international cable company controlled by industry legend John Malone, said that it is interested in pursuing deals with mobile carriers in Ireland and Poland and hopes to have agreements in hand by the end of the year.

On its Q4 earnings call with analysts, Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries said pursuing such deals was “high on our list” of priorities.

Liberty already has about 1 million cable and 120,000 mobile subscribers in Ireland through its Virgin Media unit. In Poland, its UPC Poland operation has about 3.3 million video, internet and telephone customers and 62,700 mobile subscribers through an MVNO agreement.

Also Read: Cadent Teams with Liberty on Addressable in Europe

The Irish mobile market is dominated by three carriers -- Vodafone; Three Group, owned by international telecom conglomerate CK Hutchison; and Eir, owned by French billionaire Xavier Niel. In Poland, potential targets could include Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Play and Polkomtel. Liberty tried to expand its presence in Poland in 2018 with the purchase of Multimedia Polska for about $876 million, but abandoned that deal because of regulatory opposition and difficulties in coming to financial terms with the sellers. 

Fries added that Liberty Global has been aggressive in the M&A space, completing more than $80 billion worth of transactions in the past five years, that allowed the company to exit or enter markets, depending on its scale. Most recently, Liberty Global’s agreement to merge its Virgin Media business with Telefonica’s O2 in a joint venture valued at about $38 billion is scheduled to close in the summer pending regulatory approval. 

“I think the way we’ve done it depends on the market - we either exited, bought or merged, and we think in all cases we’ve done the right thing, so we now have the number one or two player in these markets and that gives the scale to be, I would say, opportunistic and creative," Fries said on the call. 

Ireland and Poland, where Fries said Liberty Global hasn’t had the same M&A activity, will be looked at closely, especially in the fixed mobile space. 

“The markets that we haven’t yet done anything in, Ireland and Poland for example, of course we’re going to continue to evaluate what the right long-term future for those markets is in terms of their strategic footprint and whether there’s a fixed mobile opportunity, so you should assume that that’s high on our list,” Fries said. “It would be surprising to me if we ended 2021 without continued transformation even in those two markets, whatever that might look like.”

In 2020, Liberty Global said revenue declined 1.5% to $12 billion and EBITDA fell 3.9% to $4.9 billion. In the UK and Ireland, where broadband customers increased by 100,000 for the year, revenue was flat at about $6.6 billion. 

In the earlier days of Netflix, co-founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings and his DVD rental startup were often underestimated by folks like Blockbuster Video impresario Joe Antioco, who notably rebuffed an overture to purchase the then small Silicon Valley company.

But Liberty Global Chairman John Malone says he saw Netflix comin’ all the way. 

Malone described an early interaction with Hastings while interviewed last week by Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries in a virtual event produced by the Paley Center. (Hat tip to LightShed Partners principal analyst Richard Greenfield for highlighting the event in the firm’s blog. The interview is also archived here.) 

According to Malone, at some point, Fries invited Hastings to a Liberty Global board meeting, and Hastings tried to assure the room that Netflix had “no intention” of producing its own content or competing with the then-thriving video services of cable companies like Liberty. 

“I responded to him at the time, bulls***,” Malone recalled. “It was clear where he was headed, and if he didn’t understand that, he was going to figure it out.”

(Hastings hasn't corroborated or disputed this public account.)

Malone also recounted the time he tried to have DirecTV acquire Netflix when he was chairing the satellite TV company: “I knew it was going to be a home run at that point and that was when [Hastings] was struggling with getting rid of his old mail platform. What I saw was global scale.” 

Is Roku the Next Netflix?

Malone also spent some time discussing the growing clout of Roku, which has seen its market capitalization quickly grow to nearly $30 billion after an up-and-down first 18 months on the Nasdaq. 

Roku, which still hasn’t come to terms with WarnerMedia to support HBO Max, also recently touted that its connected TV device platform has 46 million active users. 

Malone said that if Roku’s platform continues to expand—reaching, say, the magic 100 million active user mark—it could establish market power similar to the Apple App Store, where content suppliers have to “pay to play.”

“That’s a function of how big and unique the platform is,” Malone said. “So if the platform provider can capture a large enough global scale of consumers who are essentially using it as a bundling agent—as an intermediary—then they’re going to have market power over the suppliers of the content, and they will emerge to use that market power to get a pricing or access differentiator, and they’ll build a business based on it. I think the reason you see so much market cap flowing to Roku right now is because they seem to have developed an independent separate public company platform that is becoming essentially a channel store of scale.”

Liberty Broadband and GCI Liberty, two investment vehicles of cable legend John Malone, have agreed to a merger that will combine Liberty Media’s two largest cable interests -- Charter Communications and Alaskan cable and telecom company GCI -- in a deal that hopefully will unlock value for both.

Liberty Broadband’s main asset is its 24.4% interest in Charter, a position it acquired in 2013. Analysts have long expected a combination of GCI and Liberty Broadband, mainly to unlock value.

Liberty Broadband began trading as a tracking stock on Nov. 5, 2014.  Its stock price has increased by about 203% in that time, compared to Charter, whose shares have risen 244% in the same time frame. GCI Liberty has been a different story.

Liberty Media subsidiary Liberty Interactive purchased GCI in April 2017 for $1.1 billion. The GCI asset was spun out of Liberty Interactive (now Qurate Retail Group) into another tracking stock (Liberty Ventures) and began trading as GCI Liberty (NASDAQ symbol: GLIB) in March 2018. The stock opened March 12, 2018 at $54.29 each and in the past two years has risen about 54%, closing at $83.62 per share on Aug. 7.

“This process was driven by independent special committees of Liberty Broadband and GCI Liberty, and John Malone and I fully endorse the combination,” Liberty Broadband and GCI Liberty CEO Greg Maffei said in a press release. “The transaction is financially attractive and beneficial for both companies.”

According to the deal terms, each holder of GCI Liberty shares will receive 0.588 shares of Liberty Broadband stock in exchange for their GCI shares. At the close of he deal, expected in the first half of 2021, former GCI Liberty shareholders will own 30.6% of the newly combined company. 

Aside from its Charter stocks, Liberty Broadband includes Boston-based location technology company Skyhook. GCI Liberty’s principal assets consist of GCI Holdings, and non-controlling interests in Liberty Broadband, Charter, and online lender LendingTree.

According to the companies, the combination will allow the two to save on overhead costs, simplify its management and administrative structure, reduce trading discounts to its equities, and improve flexibility for future acquisitions.

In addition, the merger will allow Liberty Broadband to take advantage of the lower pierced GCI Liberty equity, and gives it another attractive cable asset. GCI Liberty in turn gets a premium price for its stock, is tied to a more strategic equity, gets a more liquid currency in Liberty Broadband stock and gains access to a larger, more stable balance sheet.

Malone will continue to control 49% of the combined company’s vote. Liberty Broadband said the deal values GCI Liberty at $8.7 billion. Malone will remain chairman of Liberty Broadband and CEO Maffei also will retain his role in the combined entity. GCI CEO Ron Duncan and other GCI management will continue in those roles after the close. 

Liberty Broadband and GCI Liberty, two investment vehicles of cable legend John Malone, have agreed to a merger that will combine Liberty Media’s two largest cable interests -- Charter Communications and Alaskan cable and telecom company GCI -- in a deal that hopefully will unlock value for both.

Liberty Broadband’s main asset is its 24.4% interest in Charter, a position it acquired in 2013. Analysts have long expected a combination of GCI and Liberty Broadband, mainly to unlock value.

Related: Northern Exposure

Liberty Broadband began trading as a tracking stock on Nov. 5, 2014.  Its stock price has increased by about 203% in that time, compared to Charter, whose shares have risen 244% in the same time frame. GCI Liberty has been a different story.

Liberty Media subsidiary Liberty Interactive purchased GCI in April 2017 for $1.1 billion. The GCI asset was spun out of Liberty Interactive (now Qurate Retail Group) into another tracking stock (Liberty Ventures) and began trading as GCI Liberty (NASDAQ symbol: GLIB) in March 2018. The stock opened March 12, 2018 at $54.29 each and in the past two years has risen about 54%, closing at $83.62 per share on Aug. 7.

“This process was driven by independent special committees of Liberty Broadband and GCI Liberty, and John Malone and I fully endorse the combination,” Liberty Broadband and GCI Liberty CEO Greg Maffei said in a press release. “The transaction is financially attractive and beneficial for both companies.”

According to the deal terms, each holder of GCI Liberty shares will receive 0.588 shares of Liberty Broadband stock in exchange for their GCI shares. At the close of he deal, expected in the first half of 2021, former GCI Liberty shareholders will own 30.6% of the newly combined company. 

Aside from its Charter stocks, Liberty Broadband includes Boston-based location technology company Skyhook. GCI Liberty’s principal assets consist of GCI Holdings, and non-controlling interests in Liberty Broadband, Charter, and online lender LendingTree.

According to the companies, the combination will allow the two to save on overhead costs, simplify its management and administrative structure, reduce trading discounts to its equities, and improve flexibility for future acquisitions.

In addition, the merger will allow Liberty Broadband to take advantage of the lower pierced GCI Liberty equity, and gives it another attractive cable asset. GCI Liberty in turn gets a premium price for its stock, is tied to a more strategic equity, gets a more liquid currency in Liberty Broadband stock and gains access to a larger, more stable balance sheet.

Malone will continue to control 49% of the combined company’s vote. Liberty Broadband said the deal values GCI Liberty at $8.7 billion. Malone will remain chairman of Liberty Broadband and CEO Maffei also will retain his role in the combined entity. GCI CEO Ron Duncan and other GCI management will continue in those roles after the close. 

Cable pioneer J.C. Sparkman died at age 87 on July 16. Sparkman spent three decades as chief operations officer for Tele-Communications Inc., which was ultimately bought by AT&T for $48 billion.

“J.C. was one of a kind,” said former TCI CEO John Malone, now chairman of Liberty Global and Liberty Media. ”Both of us entered the cable TV business through Jerrold Electronics more than 50 years ago. He was absolutely key to making TCI the largest and most important cable company in America. We really built the company on J.C.’s back." 

“His incredible energy and his leadership in building a team that could survive adversity and then grow exponentially was unmatched,” Malone added. ”He was a builder of companies but never lost sight of what mattered most in life, his incredible family.”

Sparkman was hired by Tele-Communications Inc. founder Bob Magness in 1969.

Sparkman was on the board of Liberty Global and had been on the boards of Universal Electronics, Inc., On Command Corporation, TSX Corporation, Liberty Media International, Inc., Comcast Cable Holdings LLC, DMX Inc., and United Video Satellite Group.

Sparkman was a co-founder of Cable in the Classroom and J.C. Sparkman Center for National Teacher Training, which provided free technology education for teachers.

He also teamed with Magness to seed the Betsy Magness Leadership Institute.

Sparkman is survived by his wife of 69 years, Dolores, daughters Debra Urband, Pam Bartheis and son, Michael Sparkman. He also has six grandchildren, nine great-grandchildren and a sister, Velta Mae Grabeal.

Services will be for family only due to the pandemic. Donations in lieu of flowers can be made to the J.C. and Dolores Sparkman Cancer Fund, Children's Hospital Colorado Foundation, 13123 E. 16th Ave., B045, Aurora, CO, 80045

Groups backing music creators and opposing media concentration have asked the Justice Department to reject what they said is John Malone's proposed purchase of iHeartMedia, the nation's largest radio station owner.

Justice is reportedly vetting a Liberty Media's proposal to boost its current stake in the radio/online audio giant to a controlling interest or ownership. 

In a letter to Antitrust Division chief Makan Delrahim, the Center for Digital Democracy, American Economic Liberties Project, Artist Rights Alliance, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Open Markets Institute, and Public Citizen, said it should nix the deal.  

Related: Trump Talks to Telecom, Tech Execs About Re-Opening Economy 

They argue that the combination of iHeartMedia with Liberty's controlling stake in satellite radio service Sirius/XM (which now owns Pandora) and 33% stake in LiveNation/Ticketmaster would create a dominant non-streaming and streaming audio distribution giant with likely "catastrophic" consequences for competition. 

"For listeners, it will almost certainly mean fewer options, less diversity, and higher prices," they argued. And for artists, "[u]p and coming talent will face an even greater challenges cracking through shrinking nationalized playlists." 

"This merger will also be a setback in the struggle for fair economics for music distribution, as the new conglomerate uses its massive power to demand cut-rate, below-market royalty rates at the pain of being shut out across these major platforms altogether," they predicted, adding: "This unacceptable new proposal will put a broad array of music creators at a massive disadvantage in an arena that is already massively stacked against them. Please reject Liberty Media's bid to acquire any meaningful portion of iHeartMedia." 

Liberty Media chairman John Malone said his company’s failed attempt to purchase the 21 Fox regional sports networks put up for sale earlier this year by the Walt Disney Co., would have helped to right what he sees as one of cable’s biggest mistakes -- allowing content providers to force distributors to carry programming bundles that are too large and too pricey.

Liberty was one of several bidders for the Fox RSNs, which were eventually won by Sinclair Broadcast Group and a minority partner -- Byron Allen’s Entertainment Studios -- for about $9.6 billion.  Liberty had reportedly teamed up with Major League Baseball in its bid, but backed off when the price became too high.

At Liberty’s Investor Day in New York Thursday, Malone confirmed that Liberty teamed with MLB on a bid, which he said would have been “affordable, and less disruptive.”

Related: RSN Redux 

“It was designed essentially to be a little more rational, and not to allow retransmission consent to be confounded with regional sports,” Malone said. “The unfairness of that leverage would just make the overpricing of the big bundle that much worse.”

Malone continued that he saw the cable industry’s allowing networks to make carrying all of their networks across the board as a contractual obligation, as a mistake.

“That really turned the negotiation into a tax,” Malone said. “Once there was competition among distributors and a fear that distributors would lose market share if they didn’t carry pretty much everything in the sports area, it really just turned sports programming into a tax.”

He added that in addition to enriching players and distributors, that practice also drove the price of the big bundle beyond the economic limits of many households.

“If you didn’t have that component in the cost of content, you would probably see far fewer cord cutting for economic reasons,” Malone said.

While Dish Network managed to report a solid Q3 even after dropping the Fox RSNs in July, Malone said satellite’s economics are different, because in many markets it is the only viable video alternative. For other distributors with three or even four competitors, it would be tougher to survive without the channels.

Late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) had proposed a solution about a dozen years ago, where any network that was priced wholesale over a certain threshold, would be made available a la carte by the distributor.

“The industry had a chance to support that and did not,” Malone said. “It was a huge mistake.”

Liberty Media chairman John Malone believes that consolidation, which has swept through the traditional cable distribution business largely at his own hand, will come to streaming video as well, and that could be good news for traditional pay TV companies.

Malone, speaking at Liberty’s annual Investor Day in New York, said that first the streaming business will likely experience a period of “hyper-competition” as more and more content owners crowd in to the space.

Already several content owners have debuted direct-to-consumer services -- Disney’s Disney+ offering was launched on Nov. 12 and had 10 million people sign up for the service during its first days, while Apple TV+ launched on Nov. 1 to considerably less hype. AT&T plans to begin offering HBO Max in May in addition to an IP-based streaming service -- AT&T TV -- later in the year.

“In the short run you’re going to see hyper-competition as content owners try to get into the scripted streaming global market space,” Malone said during a Q&A session at the Liberty Investor Day. “I think a lot of investment is going to go in to trying to capture leadership market share in that space. Eventually there’ll be consolidation in that space because it probably won’t support as many competitors as currently think it represents a good opportunity. Some will become niche players, some will become more national players less global players. Quite a few will survive and be able to watch as less competition turns down the heat under the cost of creation of new content.”

Malone said the business already is going through “some skirmishes and maybe some promo wars that will settle down over time.”

The big bundle, a staple of the early cable business, will likely continue to lose popularity. But he said, that could open up other opportunities for cable operators.

“The big bundle -- that number is probably going to shrink slowly in terms of big bundle customers, but probably grow in terms of the app customers,” Malone said, adding that cable distributors could eventually sell packages of OTT services to customers, similar to what it does for Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime apps that customers access via set-top boxes.

Malone pointed to Charter Communications -- in which Liberty owns a stake -- as one cable operator that could benefit from this change.

“We saw this play before when multichannel content providers all wanted to be carried and ended up being bundled together and became a video package,” Malone said. “That all happened in the 1980s. That is likely to happen, perhaps with a couple of the big global guys, but in particular with national or regional or specialty or niche providers. I don’t think, in terms of entertainment, that one size fits all.”

Liberty Latin America has agreed to purchase AT&T’s wireless and wireline assets in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands for $1.95 billion in cash, the company said Wednesday.

Liberty Latin America, which was spun off from John Malone’s LibertyGlobal as an independent publicly traded company in 2018, already has an extensive presence in Puerto Rico. This deal, according to Liberty Latin America CEO Balan Nair, will allow the company to expand its product portfolio to include a popular post-paid mobile offering and increase its distribution channels on the island.

News of the deal boosted Liberty Latin America stock was up nearly 3% in early trading Wednesday to $17.06 per share.

“The combination of AT&T’s leading mobile businesses with Liberty Puerto Rico’s leading high-speed broadband and TV business will create a strong and competitive integrated communications player, with a combined annual revenue of over $1.2 billion in Puerto Rico and $4.6 billion across LLA,” Nair said in a press release. “By continuing to invest in digital infrastructure, innovation, 5G networks and a friendly customer service experience, we are confident that this new combination will support our long-term growth profile and that this deal will be free cash flow accretive on a per share basis.”

The sale should also serve to calm some investors who had been advocating for AT&T to sell off non-core assets to help pay down its $80 billion in debt. In September, investor Elliott Management called for the company to sell off its DirecTV and WarnerMedia units to focus on its core wireless business. While this deal is not early as extreme, it shows that the company is at least paying attention.

The assets involved in the deal include AT&T’s consumer mobile and B2B services in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, but exclude its DirecTV customers in those areas. In Puerto Rico, which Liberty said accounts for about 90% of the total assets being acquired, AT&T is the top provider of mobile services, and has agreed to support Liberty Latin America for up to 36 months following the closing of the deal to enable an efficient transition.

Liberty Latin America will finance the transaction through a combination of $2.2 billion in borrowings on the combined assets and Liberty Puerto Rico (including refinancing $922.5 million in existing term loans at Liberty Puerto Rico) and the remaining $750 million from Liberty Latin America’s committed liquidity of $2.0 billion on June 30.

Liontree LLC and Credit Suisse are acting as financial advisers to Liberty Latin America on the transaction. 

Liberty Media chairman John Malone has sold his remaining shares in Lionsgate Entertainment to the studio's non-executive chairman Mark Rachesky and his own international cable firm Liberty Global.

According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Oct. 3 by Rachesky’s MHR Fund Management, MHR agreed to buy 2.4 million shares of Lionsgate stock from Malone for about $22.1 million on Oct. 2. After the deal, MHR beneficially owned about 22% of Lionsgate’s Class A voting shares and 11% of its Class B non-voting shares.

In a separate SEC filing Thursday, Malone revealed he sold about 520,000 shares of Lionsgate stock on the open market between Sept. 27 and Sept. 30 for between $9 and $9.80 per share. With those sales, the filing stated that Malone “beneficially owns no shares” of Lionsgate Class A voting stock.

Malone sold about 1.2 million shares of Lionsgate stock between Sept. 9 and Sept. 20 at prices ranging from $9.48 to $11.73 per share and from Aug.19 to Sept. 6 shed 1.4 million shares at prices ranging from $8.90 to $11.33 per share. At about the same time, Liberty Global revealed in an SEC filing that it had increased its stake in Lionsgate to 4.9% of its outstanding shares.

Malone has been actively cutting down on business travel and reducing his board positions over the past several months -- last year he stepped down from Lionsgate’s board of directors (he was replaced by his nephew Daniel Sanchez) and also retired from Charter Communications' board. 

The Lionsgate sale comes about three years after Malone became one of Lionsgate’s top  individual shareholders when Liberty Media sold its Starz LLC premium network to the studio for $4.4 billion in 2016. As part of that deal, Malone -- who had swapped his 4.5% interest in Starz for a 3.4% stake in Lionsgate and a seat on its board of directors a year earlier -- saw his overall interest in the studio rise to about 8.1% of outstanding shares. He has been gradually reducing that stake ever since. 

Speculation around The Walt Disney Co.’s auction for the Fox’s 22 regional sports networks has gained some considerable heat over the past few weeks. The latest is that cable legend John Malone, who once owned most of those networks in an earlier life, is gathering up partners for a possible bid.

Disney put the networks up for sale in October,  a condition of federal approval of its larger $71.3 billion purchase of certain 21st Century Fox assets. As part of that approval, Disney agreed to sell the channels within 90 days after closing the bigger Fox deal. With some analysts predicting the Fox transaction could close as early as the latter part of March -- officially, Disney is saying the deal will be completed in the first half of the year -- time is of the essence.

On the surface, regional sports networks would seem easy to sell -- sports, next to live news, is one of the few remaining ratings grabbers in the TV business. But RSNs come with a lot of baggage. For starters they are tiered by most distributors, which limits their total number of viewers. They are expensive -- the larger RSNs can garner monthly affiliate fees well in excess of $4 per subscriber per month. And the largest and most attractive RSN in the mix -- the New York Yankees’ YES Network -- likely won’t be part of the sale. The Yankees have the right of first refusal to purchase Fox’s 80% interest in the network, and are reportedly talking to private equity players and online retailing giant Amazon about pairing up for a bid.

With YES out of the mix, that leaves regional sports networks in towns like Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, Detroit, Minneapolis and Kansas City. Already several potential suitors have lined up -- Sinclair Broadcast Group, private equity players like Apollo Global Asset Management, Major League Baseball itself, and Malone. 

According to a report in the NY Post, Malone, who owns baseball’s Atlanta Braves, is reportedly talking to Platinum Equity chief Tom Gores (who also owns the NBA Detroit Pistons) and Jim Pohlad, owner of MLB’s Minnesota Twins, about ginning up a bid. Fox Business was first to report on Malone’s interest. The owners are apparently worried that an outside buyer of the RSNs would allocate more resources to larger markets and leave smaller teams in the lurch. Other teams could join Malone, including the Arizona Diamondbacks and Milwaukee Brewers.

Related: MLB Commissioner on Fox RSNs: We’re Interested 

But there could be another unintended beneficiary of the Fox RSN deal -- MSG Networks. MSG, which operates two sports channels in the New York market, MSG Network and MSG + -- could be the missing piece of the puzzle for any buyer. With YES out of the mix, MSG is the only other New York area RSN available -- SportsNet NY is owned by The New York Mets baseball club, Comcast and Charter and isn’t likely for sale. And an MSG Networks buy would be pretty clean -- the company split from its former parent Madison Square Garden in 2015 -- and is a pure-play sports network.

In a research note, FBN Securities media analyst Robert Routh said Liberty’s reported interest only enhances the takeout value of MSG.

“Here we think it is more likely than not the Yankees will exercise their right of first refusal on the 80% of the YES Network currently owned by Fox,” Routh wrote. “If the case, then whoever buys the Fox RSN’s will likely need a NY area sports RSN to make the “RSN Group” work. Here, MSGN remains the only other game in town and we think the current multiple does not accurately reflect this.”

Malone apparently wasn’t interested in getting into the RSN fray earlier in the process, but fears about being pushed around by a larger owner apparently spurred him to action. According to Fox Business, Liberty CEO Greg Maffei let Disney know it was interested as the second round of the auction closed. 

Malone is no stranger to the sports business -- his Prime Sports morphed into Fox Sports RSNs in 1995 after he struck a deal with Fox, later selling his stake in the channels to the programmer in 1997.  Malone also has interests in other RSNs through his investment in Charter Communications, in Los Angeles -- the NBA Lakers’ channel Spectrum SportsNet and the MLB Los Angeles Dodgers’ SportsNet LA.

Related: Books Out on Fox RSNs 

Disney hasn’t said much about the auction aside from acknowledging it’s been going on, but that hasn’t stopped speculation from running rampant. On Disney’s Feb.5 earnings conference Disney CFO Christine McCarthy recognized the noise.

“There's a lot of chatter out in the market,” McCarthy said of the RSN auction. “I won't comment on it, just to say that not everything you hear is necessarily true.”

Related: The Curious Case of the RSNs 

But the longer the auction drags on, the lower the value of the networks. When it became clear that Disney would have to sell the RSNs to gain approval for the larger Fox deal, analysts valued the channels at between $20 billion and $22 billion. But as time has gone on, that value has plummeted, with some reports placing the value of the RSNs -- sans YES Network -- at around $10 billion, or between 6 times and 8 times cash flow.

Some observers have hoped that Malone’s involvement could goose what has been a lackluster auction process, with some reports saying a potential deal could now cost $13 billion or more, still well below the $20 billion once hoped. But Malone has traditionally been a bargain hunter -- in the past he has left the grand gestures to free spenders like Fox chief Rupert Murdoch and others. And early reports said he was leaning toward offering what others had bid -- $10 billion. Malone could well bid more, but it’s his move. And that’s just how he likes it.

Liberty Media chief John Malone said the proliferation of direct-to-consumer offerings from programmers is likely to create opportunities for deals involving the smaller companies left behind.

Over the past few years, programmers have increasingly moved toward distributing their own content themselves, most recently with the Walt Disney Co., launching its direct-to-consumer sports offering -- ESPN + -- in April and plans to launch an entertainment focused offering -- Disney + -- in 2019.

That could mean that small, independent content companies, which Malone calls free radicals, may have to think fast to either start their own DTC offerings, or join forces with larger entities.

“Are there other free radicals around,” Malone said at Liberty’s annual Investor Day in New York. “Certainly on the video side. This change of the power of the direct-to-consumer distributors on a global basis is creating some orphans, Whether or not those orphans could be aggregated or at least have synergies in combination, I think is an important thing you will see over the next couple of years. Not everybody is going to be able to do a global direct-to-consumer platform. Many will be trying to move into that space as a supplier or a player, perhaps in some cases branded or in other cases as part of the food chain. There is no question going to be dislocation that will be offset by synergies of combination. I think you can expect a lot of transactions.”

Related: Inside the Curious Mind of John Malone

Malone used Discovery's purchase of Scripps Networks earlier this year as an example.

Discovery and Scripps, he said, are “two companies facing the same challenges but in the short term taking advantage of the synergies to create a stronger and more durable enterprise while they figure out what the long-term strategy is in a transitioning industry.”

Malone added that broadcasters could also be considered “free radicals.”

“Their retransmission extraction is really just the monetization of some large sports contracts,” Malone said. “Because without those large sports contracts they would not be receiving these fees from distributors. Their entertainment programming is being supplanted by the Netflixes of the world and they really don’t have the budgets to compete in the creation of this kind of content. And their advertising revenue is being eroded by the database-rich approaches of Google and Facebook. They’re in an awkward position. If they lose or see those sports contracts get much more expensive, they’re going to have a very difficult time.

“So the question is, ‘What do they do?’” Malone continued. “ Are they becoming free radicals, or can they be protected by the collective? The speculation is the best buyer for regional sports is going to be Fox itself, the previous owner. Why? Because they they have lot of market power they derive through the collective of Fox News, the broadcast network and therefore regional sports could be more valuable to them than to others.”

Related: The Curious Case of the RSNs

Malone had similar insights to TV and movie production studios, which he said initially saw Netflix as just another buyer of content.

“Initially it was, ‘Oh boy, Netflix needs a lot of content and they are going to lease it from us.’” Malone said. “Then it became ‘they are going to buy it from us but we can keep some rights.’ Then it became ‘they are going to buy it from us and we don’t get to keep any rights.’ Then it got to be ‘if we don’t deal with them, then they’ll go to our producers and talent and do it themselves.’ You get this disintermediation that takes place, and the traditional role of the studio starts to disintegrate, because of this changing monetization that Netflix started. The studios have got to figure out ‘do we get together and get bigger,’ which you saw Disney and Fox do. I think you see a lot of public vehicles right now that are or will become free radicals.” 

Charter Communications said cable legend and major shareholder John Malone has retired from its board of directors, but will remain as a director emeritus of the cable giant.

Malone helped spur Charter’s pursuit of Time Warner Cable after his Liberty Media purchased a 27% stake in the cable giant in 2013. Charter completed its merger with Time Warner Cable in 2016.

According to a statement, Malone decided to step down from the Charter board to cut down on travel and to focus his attention on fewer board positons. Last week the cable legend also said he would step down from the board of Lions Gate Entertainment.

As director emeritus, Malone will still attend board meetings, and provide advice and support to the company, but will no longer have a vote on matters presented to the board. Malone’s board seat will be filled by Sirius XM CEO James Meyer. Malone also is a major shareholder of Sirius XM.

"The Board and I appreciate John's service to Charter and will continue to benefit from his counsel as a director emeritus," said in a statement. “Jim Meyer's broad experience, including at Sirius XM, will benefit the Charter board of directors and I look forward to serving with him. With the addition of Jim and the continued participation of John, I am confident that the Charter board of directors will continue to provide the leadership and oversight to ensure that Charter's future remains bright."

Malone served on the Board as a designee of

"I remain heavily invested in Charter, both financially and emotionally, and am excited about its prospects,” Malone said in a statement. “As the Liberty Broadband nominee to the Charter board, brings a strong track record and wealth of relevant experience, and I will remain an active advisor in my director emeritus role."

With its decision to go public with its heretofore unmentioned desire for 21st Century Fox assets currently betrothed to the The Walt Disney Co., Comcast appears to be gearing up for an epic battle that hearkens back to the old media mogul days, when oversized personalities like Sumner Redstone, Barry Diller and John Malone duked it out for control of media properties.

In a statement spurred in part by public filings by Disney and Fox for their upcoming shareholders meetings, Comcast said it was “considering, and is in advanced stages of preparing, an offer for the businesses that Fox has agreed to sell to Disney.”

With that, Comcast took off the gloves, making it clear that it was not only preparing for battle, it was more than ready. It closed its terse statement by stating while no decision had been made “at this point, the work to finance the all-cash offer and make the key regulatory filings is well advanced.”

In other words: Bring it on.

Throwback Move

The media landscape is littered with tales of bare-knuckle brawls between entertainment titans. And the current love triangle that is Comcast-Disney- Fox has jogged some memories back to 1994, when three epic media personalities — Paramount Communications chief Martin Davis, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone and QVC chief Barry Diller — battled publicly over the movie studio.

Diller, who had worked at Paramount earlier in his career, had been rumored to be interested in making a deal for the studio, but had pulled back at the last minute, according to a 1994 article in Vanity Fair. In that piece, Diller had lunch with Davis at Paramount’s private dining room in Manhattan, deflecting the Paramount CEO’s fears that he was considering a bid for the studio. Two months later, Paramount announced a deal with Viacom, valued at about $8.2 billion. Shortly after, backed by then Tele-Communications Inc. chairman John Malone, Diller launched a hostile bid for the studio for $9.5 billion.

What followed was a five-month bloody battle between the moguls involving lawsuits, poison pills and a lot of finger-pointing. In the end, Viacom emerged the victor with a $10 billion bid. It is unlikely that Comcast will get off that cheaply this time.

MoffettNathanson senior media analyst Michael Nathanson has estimated that Comcast would likely bid about $10 billion more than Disney for the Fox assets. That, he said in a note to clients, is something Disney can easily match.

Nathanson estimated that Disney’s current offer for the Fox assets is valued at about $68 billion, $54 billion in equity and $14 billion in assumed debt. Assuming that Comcast would offer about the same as it did before — it was rejected in the early rounds of bidding because of potential regulatory concerns and the Murdoch family’s distaste for Comcast stock — its cash bid would be valued at about $78 billion in total ($64 billion in equity and $14 billion in assumed debt), according to Nathanson. “We would expect Disney to match that higher bid with $10 billion in cash added in to its existing deal,” Nathanson wrote.

Nathanson has said Iger is determined to win the Fox assets, and believes the Disney chief has “never backed down from making the right long-term strategic moves for his company because of price.”

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, the veteran of many mega-deals ranging from industry-defining acquisitions like AT&T Broadband in 2001 and NBCUniversal in 2011 to smaller content buys like DreamWorks Animation, is no stranger to asset battles. But he has preferred to take the high road in most of his transactional endeavors. At the same time, Comcast investors appeared spooked by the company’s interest in Fox, with some interpreting it as an indication that the cable company has lost faith in its U.S. distribution business.

Although Comcast has denied that — even as it made a $31 billion formal offer for U.K. satellite company Sky, of which Fox owns a 39% stake — shares in the cable firm have plunged about 20% this year. The public admission of its interest in Fox hasn’t helped either, as Comcast shares were down about 3% since it made the announcement.

That decline has come just as Netflix, once thought of as the cable killer, has risen. Last week, Netflix’s market capitalization briefly touched $153 billion, passing Disney ($152.2 billion) and Comcast ($145.5 billion) for the first time, before settling for a tie with the Mouse House, closing May 24 with a market cap of about $152 billion. Fueling those gains has been an 82% surge in Netflix’s share price since December.

Disney’s Big War Chest

Disney, which has low leverage — about 1.2 times forward-looking cash flow — and $9 billion in free cash flow, can afford a bidding war with Comcast. Nathanson estimated borrowing the additional $10 billion needed to compete with the Comcast bid would increase its leverage ratio to about 1.6 times at the end of 2020, not a major concern for ratings agencies.

Comcast, on the other hand, would see its debt balloon to $164 billion in a Fox deal, according to Moody’s Investors Service. In a note, it said a Fox bid, estimated at about $60 billion for the equity, would drive Comcast’s overall leverage past 4.3 times cash flow, endangering its investment-grade debt rating.

Moody’s placed Comcast’s A3 debt ratings on review for possible downgrade last week, adding that a Fox bid would make it the second highest leveraged media company behind AT&T-Time Warner. Earlier, Moody’s had warned that Comcast’s willingness to increase its debt load that much represents a big departure from past practices and stated commitments and creates “significant doubts for the future.”

But both companies see Fox as an integral part of that future and are expected to bid hard and high. Sanford Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger in a report earlier this month said Disney and Comcast believe the business has evolved to a point where there will be only a few global scale players and Fox is “the seminal defining point,” in determining who they will be.

“And therefore, we think both Comcast and Disney are likely to pay a high price,” Juenger wrote.

Liberty Global, the international cable giant controlled by John Malone, is close to selling a large chunk of its cable assets to European wireless giant Vodafone, in a deal valued at about $23 billion, according to several press reports.

According to The Financial Times, a deal could be announced as early as Wednesday morning and would include Liberty Global’s assets in Germany and Eastern Europe. Later reports, citing people familiar with the companies, said assets in Hungary, Czech Republic and Romania would be involved in the deal.

The transaction would create a strong No. 2 competitor to Deutsche Telekom, which dominates the area. And though it would face intense regulatory scrutiny, the combined entity would create a full quad-play provider of wireless, internet, video and landline telephony.

Vodafone, which has more than 120 million wireless customers in Europe, also has been a player in the cable space. It already owns Kabel Deutschland, the largest cable operator in Germany and Ono in Spain. Liberty Global’s U.K. operations, offered under the Virgin Media brand, are not part of the discussions. 

Last year Vodafone entered into a joint venture with Liberty Global’s Ziggo in The Netherlands to create a quadruple play offering of wireless, video, voice and data.

The two companies haven’t made their interest a secret – they last acknowledged they were in talks in February. 

Like its U.S. counterparts, Liberty Global has struggled with video subscriber losses. Liberty Global lost about 84,000 video revenue generating units in the first quarter, more than five times the 15,000 RGUs it shed in the prior year.  

A day after it said it would withdraw its plans for an initial public offering, Univision Communications could be in line for even more changes. The company confirmed late Wednesday (March 7) that long-time CEO Randy Falco has approached the board about retiring early – at the end of this year – amid reports that the Spanish-language content giant is mulling a restructuring that would drastically reduce costs.

Univision withdrew its IPO documents Tuesday (March 6), ending a three-year odyssey for the programmer. Univision set the IPO engine in motion in 2015, and even brought in former Goldman Sachs banker Francisco Lopez-Balboa as chief financial officer to head up the effort. Lopez-Balboa resigned on Tuesday. He was replaced by long-time Univision executive Peter Lori.

Falco was said to be on increasingly thin ice in the wake of the IPO withdrawal – it was seen as the main exit vehicle for the investors that took the company private in 2007 for $13.7 billion, including Providence Equity Partners, media mogul and Univision chairman Haim Saban, TPG Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners.

In a statement, Saban confirmed that Falco had approached the board earlier about accelerating his retirement, and that the board “reluctantly agreed” to his request.

“There are multiple rumors out there and on behalf of the Univision Board I would like to set the record straight about our CEO Randy Falco,” Saban said in a statement. “Recently Randy came to us and told us that he would like to retire at the end of 2018 when he will turn 65 years old and end an outstanding 8 year tenure as the CEO of Univision.  Let me be clear we at the Board of Univision have reluctantly agreed to Randy’s wishes out of respect and the high regard we have for him as a partner.  During his time as CEO he has modernized the Univision organization, grown earnings and reduced debt at record levels and we could not be more pleased with his performance. We have asked Randy to work with us over the next year in restructuring the company and consult with the board on a transition to new leadership.”

A report in the Wall Street Journal late Wednesday said the board of directors was considering replacing Falco. The report added that the Univision board also is contemplating making drastic cost cuts – up to $200 million – which could result in significant layoffs, to prepare itself for a sale. Univision had fielded several offers in the past – including one from Liberty Media chairman John Malone – but rejected them as too low.

Univision has struggled to pull the trigger on the IPO – it has postponed the offering several times due to unfavorable market conditions. The decision to finally scrap the offering could mean that it is willing to pursue a deal.

Lionsgate Entertainment shares soared Thursday after a Deadline Hollywood report said the studio is attracting interest from several possible suitors, including Amazon, Viacom, CBS, and Verizon Communications.

Lionsgate Shares closed at $34.50 on Thursday, up $2.22 each or 7%.

According to Deadline, several potential suitors are “sniffing around” Lionsgate, although no offers have been made yet. Lionsgate is the producer of blockbuster films like The Hunger Games series as well as smaller films like Wonder. The studio also has had big successes on the TV side as the home of hit series like Mad Men, Orange is the New Black and Dear White People.

Lionsgate purchased premium channel Starz in 2016 for $4.4 billion, a deal that also made cable legend John Malone a major shareholder, which has also added to the speculation that a transaction could be in the works.

Amazon is expected by many to at least be looking to boost its content holdings, although some analysts believe it will focus on live sports, like Thursday Night Football.

According to Deadline, Viacom and CBS – which are also reportedly investigating the possibility of merging – could be interested as well as Verizon. Verizon has been a popular name in deal speculation recently – it has been named as a possible suitor of Charter Communications and others – and could be looking to Lionsgate to boost its content holdings as it readies its own OTT offering sometime this spring.    

Speculation has been high that a flood of content deals could occur in the wake of The Walt Disney Co.’s agreement to purchase certain assets of 21st Century Fox for $66.1 billion. That deal is expected to close later this year. 

New York – Liberty Media chair and cable legend John Malone stood before a rapt, standing room-only audience at his company’s annual investors meeting here Thursday, telling analysts and investors that politics appears to be clouding what once was expected to be a more streamlined merger approval process.

Malone didn’t mention AT&T-Time Warner by name, but the chances of that merger passing regulatory muster have been under a cloud in recent weeks, as reports have said the government could move to block the deal if certain assets like CNN aren’t divested.

Related: Missed Connection for AT&T-Time Warner?

“I personally have very little insight into what the Antitrust Division is smoking these days,” Malone joked at the investor meeting. “Normally, verticals [mergers] have always been regarded as pretty straightforward, low-risk. To the degree politics gets into it, it becomes difficult to predict.”

Malone said that he hasn’t experienced much push back from regulators in his own business, although he added that the approval process for Discovery Communications’ (of which Liberty is a major shareholder) purchase of Scripps Networks Interactive has taken longer than expected.

“It has been a little bit delayed, more than I would have guessed,” he said.

Read More: Complete Coverage of the Discovery-Scripps Deal

But Malone still believes that smaller content companies, so-called “free radicals,” will be able to combine with little resistance from the government. But he said the current regulatory environment could be spurred by Justice Department officials wanting to rectify perceived misses in the 2011 approval of Comcast-NBC Universal. Comcast agreed to about 150 conditions for that deal, most of which expire in the middle of next year.

But those conditions were largely behavioral, centering on ensuring that Comcast did not favor its own networks more than others in terms of carriage and that it made those network available to all distributors.

“We have a new Antitrust Division, the FCC has gone more flexible, more capitalistic,” Malone said, adding that he wasn’t sure what the department’s concerns may be. “The only noise I picked up is that the professionals at Justice were not happy with the behavioral agreements they reached with Comcast on the NBC Universal deal. So they’re kind of rethinking behavioral versus structural change.”

But he added when Charter, another big Liberty holding, purchased Time Warner Cable last year, the cable operator agreed to “a number of rigorous agreements, some of which the government has voluntarily backed away from.”

Malone said the content business, both on the linear and social media side, appears to be more politically sensitive now than ever.

Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei put the situation more bluntly, adding that consolidation in the content business is happening because of obvious pressures on the model.

“In my judgment, the traditional linear content business is severely challenged,” Maffei said. “I get the idea that there should be limitations on ensuring Starz [another Liberty holding] for example,  should get carriage on DirecTV. But the content business has gone from 200 original shows five years ago, 450 this year, the cost per hour at least doubled. We’ve seen a 5x increase in content. These guys can’t pay for it, we’re not going to pay for it at Charter, I suspect. Guys like Netflix have an amazingly advantaged model compared to the traditional guys. …The traditional content business is really challenged. The idea that you’re going to block consolidation here is crazy.”

Malone also touched on the wireless business, adding that despite his continued belief that a cable company will eventually acquire or be acquired by a wireless company, Charter’s decision to offer a wireless product through an MVNO with Verizon was the right move.

Malone added that MVNO’s effectively create “more competition instead of less,” and is probably the best way to get into the wireless space.

Malone said he isn’t particularly in love with the wireless business, but over time it becomes an important part of the connectivity picture.

European cable operator Liberty Global already has a strong wireless component and Malone said the synergies are “ultimately enormous.”

Malone was particularly high on Charter’s prospects, adding that cable’s two-way capabilities and broadband business will win the day.

“When you stick stuff out there and don’t have some kind of two-way path with the consumer, how do you know who’s watching, who’s paying?” Malone said. “…The reason got we out of the satellite business when we did was because it’s a one-trick pony – video only, very high ARPU and no return path. It was clearly going to come under assault.”

But Malone added practically every new communications technology, voice, video, internet search, 5G wireless, will need some kind of robust terrestrial network to make the final connections.

“The wind is at our back,” Malone said. “And all this noise about everybody wants to buy Charter, everybody wants to have some deal with Charter, well it’s actually true. It’s a fabulous company. It’s going to go in a great direction.”

Penthera Partners, a company that specializes in software that manages the secure downloading of TV shows, movies and other large digital files to mobile devices, said it as received a $6 million investment from Liberty Global Ventures, the venture capital investment arm of cable legend John Malone’s international cable giant Liberty Global.

"I am truly excited that Liberty Global will be helping us grow Penthera and realize the full potential of our technology,” Penthera CEO Michael Willner said in a statement. “Proceeds from this financing will be used to expand our worldwide sales efforts and accelerate the development of new products and enhancements to our existing products."

Penthera develops software that allows customers to watch content when they don’t have access to a suitable internet connection. Its products have been used by several content providers servicing millions of users, including Showtime, Starz, Comcast, and Charter Communications.

"After vetting available technologies we were impressed with the feature sets included in Penthera's SDK,” Liberty Global chief technology officer (Europe) Dan Hennessy said in a statement. “Whether it's for viewing video when connectivity is limited, intermittent or expensive, downloading is a feature we know customers want and will value greatly, which is why we decided to invest in the company."  

TPG Growth, the growth equity unit of investment firm TPG, has partnered with John Malone’s Liberty Global to form a television production and distribution studio, Platform One Media.

TPG said it will fund its investment through Evolution Media, an investment partnership with CAA and Participant Media. Liberty Global will initially take a minority stake in the partnership. Additional terms were not disclosed.   

Platform One Media will curate, develop, produce and distribute scripted programming for the U.S. and international markets. Veteran television executive Katie O’Connell Marsh, former CEO of Gaumont Television, has been appointed CEO and will be spearheading the company’s activities.

“TPG Growth has a history of identifying and building companies, such as STX Entertainment, that can redefine their categories,” said TPG Growth founder and managing partner Bill McGlashan in a statement. “Working with our partners at Evolution Media, we look forward to leveraging our collective experiences and networks in the entertainment space to build this business with Katie and her team.”

While at Gaumont, O’Connell Marsh developed and produced drama series including NBC’s Hannibal, the Golden Globe-nominated Netflix series Narcos, and Hemlock Grove for Netflix. On the comedy front, she developed F Is for Family for Netflix and Gaumont, as well as the Emmy-winning 30 Rock while at NBC and the Emmy-winning Arrested Development during her tenure at Imagine.

Most recently, O’Connell Marsh was Head of Global Live Action Television for Dreamworks Animation, where she was tasked with launching the live-action television operation for the company.

Additional appointments to the Platform One Media executive team include:

• Courtney Conte, who most recently served as president of Slingshot Global Media, will be chief operating officer (COO) and president. Conte previously served as COO of BBC Worldwide Productions and co-president of Carsey-Werner. He has developed and produced numerous television series for Universal, Disney, Warner Brothers, Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS, UPN, The WB, BBC, HBO, Showtime, Nickelodeon and Lifetime.
• Elisa Ellis, who most recently served as the Head of Creative for the Live Action Television division of Dreamworks Animation, will be joining as chief creative officer. Before joining Dreamworks in 2016, Ellis was president of creative affairs & production for Gaumont Television. At Gaumont, she was responsible for overseeing all aspects of the company’s series development and production including Hannibal and Narcos.
• Erik Pack will join Platform One Media as head of distribution & co-production based in London. Pack most recently served as President of International Distribution & Co-production at Gaumont Television. Prior to that, Pack was executive vice president of International Sales and Co-Productions at Power, a London-based production and distribution company. Previously, Pack was at Hallmark Entertainment for 12 years, where he structured output deals across Europe and Latin America.
• Neil Strum, who most recently served as head of business and legal affairs for Slingshot Global Media, will take on the same position at Platform One Media. Prior to Slingshot, he served as Executive Vice President at Metan Development Group, one of the only Western companies producing original TV content in China. Strum also served as senior vice president of the William Morris Agency where he forged new business models utilizing non-traditional financing for network production.
• Also working with the team is Julia Franz, former head of creative at ABC Studios, who will serve as a consultant for the new company.

"Platform One Media has the key ingredients Liberty Global values in a strategic asset: great leadership, a clear vision and aligned, well capitalized partners,” said Liberty Global choef programming officer Bruce Mann in a statement. “It also gives us the opportunity to work with world-class talent creating high-quality scripted programming which could potentially feature on Liberty Global’s pay-TV platforms in Europe. We are fortunate to have Katie O'Connell Marsh bringing her vision, drive and creative track record, and to be working with TPG Growth, who we view as a natural strategic partner.”

As part of its launch, Platform One Media has acquired the portfolio of development projects from Slingshot Global Media and retired the Slingshot brand.

TPG has been very active in the cable space recently, purchasing overbuilder RCN and Grande Communications in August 2016 for $2.25 billion and Wave Broadband in May for $2.4 billion.

“The explosion of original content globally is creating an opportunity for new, innovative, and diverse ways to engage audiences beyond the series itself,” O’Connell Marsh said in a statement. “With Platform One Media, and our partners TPG Growth and Liberty Global, we are perfectly positioned to develop and distribute compelling narratives that are artistic, meaningful and addictive by working closely with innovative, inspiring talent to bring to life their creative visions."

Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries will be the first of two general session keynote speakers when the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) and its global arm, the International Society of Broadband Experts™ (ISBE), host SCTE•ISBE Cable-Tec Expo 2017 on Oct. 18, in Denver.

Fries will discuss a wide range of topics during his keynote conversation, including how the convergence of wireline and wireless is helping to drive new business opportunities for pay-TV providers.

Fries joins another top cable executive – Charter Communications chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge – at the Cable-Tec Expo general session.  Rutledge will offer keynote remarks on the future of cable telecommunications and how network innovation will be a significant contributor to business results.

“With multiple industry organizations holding events during Expo Week, the eyes of the industry will be on SCTE•ISBE Cable-Tec Expo 2017,” said SCTE-ISBE CEO Mark Dzuban in a statement.  “Mike Fries’ insights and vision will underscore the impact of technology innovation, seamless product deployment and SCTE•ISBE in helping all sectors of our industry achieve success in a rapidly changing marketplace.”

Under Fries, Liberty Global as grown to provide broadband, entertainment, voice and mobile services to 25 million customers in more than 30 countries. A founding member of the management team that launched the company’s international expansion over 25 years ago, Fries was named president and CEO of Liberty Global in 2005. Fries also serves as the company ‘s vice chairman, alongside founder and chairman Dr. John Malone.

“Technology and constant innovation are the keys to keeping our customers happy in this ever changing digital world,” Fries said in a statement.  “SCTE•ISBE and its Cable-Tec Expo play vital roles in delivering the education, the standards leadership and the technology advances that will make this happen.”

SCTE•ISBE Cable-Tec Expo will be held Oct. 17-20 at the Colorado Convention Center. Expo Week begins Oct. 17 with the start of almost four-dozen technical workshops, as well as the Cable TV Pioneers Annual Banquet and Class of 2017 induction ceremonies. Registration and additional information on registration options are available at http://expo.scte.org.

The Justice Department is apparently OK with Liberty Interactive's proposed purchase of Alaska telecom GCI.

That came in an early termination notice released Thursday (June 8).

That means that Justice has found no reason to try and block or condition the deal, and put an early end to its Hart Scott Rodino antitrust review.

Related: Why John Malone Is Making Tracks to Alaska

The FCC must still weigh in on the deal. It goes beyond antitrust to look at the public interest impact of mergers in the communications space.

That review will not be concluded until at least next month. On May 19, the FCC created a pleading cycle for the deal, with comments due June 19 and reply comments due July 5.

The $1.1 billion deal was struck in April.

GCI has about 108,000 cable subscribers and is the state’s largest phone and wireless company. The deal was projected to close in early 2018.

Less than a month after he goosed the stock by saying he was open to a mega deal with Comcast, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam turned down the hype notch a few ticks at Verizon’s much anticipated Analyst Day Monday (May 8), claiming the telco is under no pressure to do transformative M&A.

Verizon has been dogged by analysts and investors that have insisted the telco has to do a big deal along the lines of rival AT&T, which in October announced a $108.7 billion merger with Time Warner Inc. That deal, still pending, came just a year after AT&T purchased DirecTV for $48.5 billion.

Verizon has focused instead on smaller deals – after much agita, it expects to close its $4.5 billion purchase of former internet icon Yahoo in the second quarter – but some analysts have called for the company to make a big splash in the distribution or content space.

That talk was fueled in January when reports surfaced that Verizon held preliminary talks with Charter Communications about a possible merger,  which has since fizzled.  In an interview with Bloomberg in April, McAdam again opened the M&A Pandora’s Box by claiming he would be open to a deal with Comcast, Disney or CBS.  That sent Verizon stock up about 2% for a bit – it went as high as $49.49 per share that day – but since then, as no deal came, the stock has fallen to about $46.63 each.

At the Analyst Day, McAdam said the Bloomberg article that quoted him as being open to talking to Comcast on a deal wasn’t inaccurate, just out of order.

“The article that caused so much interest, let me say, a couple of weeks ago, was fairly reported, but the order was different,” McAdam said. “My comment was we prefer to grow organically. And then the question was, ‘Well, if you got a phone call from somebody, would you talk to him?’ Well, I like to consider myself a polite and hospitable person. It doesn't change anything that's gone on in the last 5 years. If somebody calls, you have a nice chat with them. But the bottom line is we don't feel the urgency that seems to be out there in the analyst community, the banking community and the media.”

McAdam proved he wasn’t fibbing a couple of days later when Verizon announced it had agreed to purchase wireless spectrum holder Straight Path for $3.1 billion. That deal – a 486% premium to 

Straight Path’s Jan. 11 closing price (the day it agreed to seek strategic alternatives after missing Federal Communications Commission deadlines to build out its network) – was a bit of a head-scratcher. Verizon had been behaving like it had all the spectrum it needed – it chose not to participate in the recent FCC wireless spectrum auctions – and was bidding against AT&T for Straight Path’s hand. But it became a little clearer in hindsight. At the analyst day, SVP of Network Infrastructure Planning Ed Chan said as the network moves toward 5G, millimeter wave spectrum (which Straight Path has a lot of) is becoming more important, but that Verizon had “more than enough capacity to bring us into 4G through 2020 easily and connecting it up -- us up into 5G.”

In a recent report, MoffettNathanson principal and senior analyst Craig Moffett wrote that Straight Path owns a large block of uncontested 28 GHz spectrum licenses that could be used for a 5G network, but perhaps more valuable is its block of 39 GHz licenses.  According to Moffett, 39 GHz frequencies are general too narrow to be useful, but the FCC has plans to repackage the licenses into wider bands. That bodes well for Straight Path, which owns 34% of the available licenses.

“In other words, he who owns Straight Path has all the leverage in working with the FCC to repackage the spectrum for an upcoming auction,” Moffett wrote. “And it goes without saying that should the auction be materially delayed, he who owns Straight path will hold essentially all the usable 39 GHz license on the market.”

But even that may be slightly missing the point. Moffett himself notes that Verizon’s participation could mean that millimeter wave could be the foundation of their entire strategy.     

And it also could be a metaphor for a continuing strategic rift between Verizon and No. 1 rival AT&T. AT&T also is pursuing its own 5G strategy – some would say DirecTV Now fits squarely in that 5G mold – but has been making most of its headlines with mega-deals. And remember not too long ago when AT&T was praised by some for taking the lower-cost path in its initial U-verse strategy, utilizing existing twisted pair plant to deliver data and video while Verizon spent billions of dollars building a fiber optic network that some called overkill. AT&T turned those tables with the $48.5 billion purchase of DirecTV in 2015, and the telco has spent the past two years transitioning U-verse customers to the satellite platform. In the meantime, AT&T continues to chuck buckets of cash at its latest strategic target (Time Warner), while Verizon is taking the opposite tack, keeping its powder dry with small deals aimed toward 5G. Who’s to say it’s the wrong move?

Cable legend John Malone has figured out a novel and characteristically complicated way to turn his two tracking stocks — Liberty Interactive and Liberty Ventures — into asset-backed equities: buy a small cable company.

Malone’s target is General Communication Inc., a small cable and telephone company based in Anchorage, Alaska, with about 107,700 basic video customers.

GCI, as it is called, also has a history with Malone. Its founders, Ron Duncan and Bob Walp, got their original funding to start the business from Malone’s Tele- Communications Inc. and, until 1986, GCI was a wholly-owned subsidiary of TCI.

GCI went public in 1987 and has carved out a nice business for itself. As the largest cable and telephone company in Alaska, GCI had 2016 revenue of $933.8 million and cash flow of $288 million.

And though Malone’s GCI purchase harkens back at least slightly to another Liberty cable investment — the 2013 purchase of a 27% interest in Charter Communications — the purpose for the most recent deal is different. While Liberty saw in Charter an underperforming asset that could be used to acquire other cable operators, which it did by buying Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks last year, the GCI deal appears to be primarily a financial play.

COMPLEX MOVE
The structure of the GCI deal is, in typical Malone fashion, complicated. But it essentially kills two birds with one cable stone.

As part of the deal, Liberty Interactive, currently a tracking stock that follows the performance of home-shopping channel QVC, will purchase GCI in a reorganization where certain assets and liabilities of its other tracking stock, Liberty Ventures, will be contributed to GCI in return for a controlling interest in the MSO. Liberty Interactive will then spin off its controlling interest in GCI in the combined company — renamed GCI Liberty — to the holders of Liberty Ventures, in return for their shares of Liberty Ventures. Liberty Interactive would then officially become QVC Group.

Basically, what the transaction does is this: It allows Malone to transform Liberty Interactive and Liberty Ventures into asset-backed equities, with Liberty Interactive becoming a pure-play programmer with QVC as its largest holding. GCI Liberty, the former Liberty Ventures, which had been an amalgamation of investments — including online invitation and social planning service Evite, interests in Liberty Broadband and florist FTD, and minority interests in Time Warner Inc. online vacation lodging company Interval Leisure Group, Charter Communications and online lender and real estate business LendingTree — becomes a purer-play distributor.

Per to the deal, QVC Group would assume the interests in Time Inc., Time Warner and Interval, while GCI Liberty would keep the Liberty Broadband and Charter interests with GCI as its anchor asset. According to Pivotal Research Group CEO and senior media and communications analyst Jeff Wlodarczak, GCI Liberty will contain 95% cable-business assets after the deal is done.

Malone is also paying a hefty premium for GCI: The price, $1.1 billion or $32.50 per share, is a 58% premium to the price the stock was trading at on April 3, the day before the deal was announced. GCI investors flocked to the stock on April 4, driving it up 64% ($12.83 each) to $33.39, suggesting they believe the price could go higher. GCI stock continued to rise on April 5, trading at $35.68 each (up 7%) that afternoon.

Tracking stocks are a good vehicle for unlocking value of assets otherwise trapped in a larger public company — Liberty has used them to showcase programming and other assets, and other companies like Sprint, which issued a PCS tracker in the 1990s, used it to let shareholders participate in the rising value of its Personal Communications Service technology. But trackers can’t be merged into other entities — they need to be asset-backed. There are also some favorable debt connotations to converting a tracker into an asset-backed stock.

Wlodarczak said that while trackers can take on debt, any borrowing is usually backed by the parent company that created the tracker and actually owns the asset. Trackers can take on margin loans, which can be risky if the market drops. Having a security with hard assets that generate meaningful cash flow “makes it less risky to put higher value margin loans on those stakes in the event the market declines materially,” he said.

While GCI Liberty is attracting all the investor attention, FBN Securities analyst Robert Routh noted that the deal could also facilitate a long-awaited merger between rival retailers QVC and HSN. Liberty Interactive owns a 38% interest in HSN, and making the stock an asset-backed one could be the final piece of the puzzle in putting the two assets together.

PATH TO HSN-QVC
Routh said he expects QVC Group to begin buying back shares almost immediately — it has about $376 million remaining on its buyback authorization, and the analyst expects that to increase significantly. That new, asset-backed equity currency could also be “used in the future to effect a merger of QVC with HSN, something that should have happened years ago, at least in our opinion,” he wrote.

Liberty and Malone have been creating and unwinding tracking stocks for decades, dating back to the first iteration of Liberty Media back in the 1990s, a tracking stock that emerged after Malone’s sale of TCI to AT&T in 1999.

In the past several years, Liberty has converted a handful of trackers into asset-backed equities, including Liberty Starz, which became Starz in 2009 and was sold to Lionsgate Entertainment in 2015; and Liberty Entertainment, which in 2009 spun out its interest in DirecTV and created the Liberty Starz tracker. He’s also created a few: Formula One Group, the tracker that was formerly Liberty Media Group; Liberty Braves, which includes its interest in Major League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves; and Liberty Sirius, which includes its interest in Sirius XM Radio.

SIDEBAR: Tracking Malone
Cable legend John Malone has been a pioneer in the tracking stock concept and has created and unwound trackers for years. Here are just a few examples.

May 2006: Liberty completes its restructuring and issues two new tracking stocks, Liberty Capital Group and Liberty Interactive Group
March 2008: Liberty completes its reclassification of the Liberty Capital Group tracking stock and issues a new tracking stock for the Liberty Entertainment Group
November 2009: Liberty completes the split-off of Liberty Entertainment and business combination with DirecTV. The remaining businesses are redesignated as Liberty Starz Group.
August 2012: Liberty issues a new tracking stock, Liberty Ventures Group.
August 2014: Liberty Ventures completes the spin-off of its controlling interest in TripAdvisor Inc. and BuySeasons into a new asset backed stock; Liberty TripAdvisor Holdings.
July 2016: Liberty Ventures Group tracking stock completes the spin-off of its subsidiary, CommerceHub Inc., into a new asset-backed stock
November 2016: Liberty Ventures Group tracking stock completes the split-off of its interest in Expedia Inc. and its subsidiary Bodybuilding.com into a new asset backed stock, Liberty Expedia Holdings Inc.

SOURCE: Liberty Interactive

Cable legend and Liberty Media chairman John Malone has been named the recipient of the Television Academy’s Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award, part of the Engineering Emmys slated for Oct. 26.

The award is named after Jenkins, a pioneer of early cinema and one of the inventors of television, and “honors a living individual whose ongoing contributions have significantly affected the state of television technology and engineering.” Malone is receiving the ward for his lifetime commitment and significant contributions to the advancement of cable television.

Past recipients of the award include founder and former Cable Labs CEO Dick Green and Sony Corp.'s Laurence Thorpe.

The 68th Annual Television Academy Engineering Awards will be held on Oct. 26 at the Loews Hollywood Hotel in Los Angeles and will be hosted by Criminal Minds star Kirsten Vangsness.

NHK’s Science and Technology Research Laboratories will receive the Philo T. Farnsworth Corprate Achievement Award, which honors an agency, company or institution whose contributions over time have substantially impacted television technology and engineering.

Six other companies are set to receive Engineering Emmy’s, according to the Television Academy: software company SyncOnSet; camera tracking technology developer Ncam Technologies; Sony Corp.’s 2/3" 4K Imaging System;power technology company Saunders Electric; wireless technology company Zaxcom;and cloud-based software developer Group It For Me!

The 68th Engineering Emmy Awards are overseen by chair Barry Zegel, Senior Vice President, General Manager CBS Television City and Committee members Wendy Aylsworth, Chris Cookson, Ruth Adelman, Stuart Bass, Jim DeFilippis, Dave Stump, William Powloski, Leon Silverman and Craig Weiss.

John Malone’s systematic transformation of Liberty Media continued last week, after the former programming juggernaut agreed to purchase international racing icon Formula One in a $4.4 billion deal.

After the deal is sealed — expected in early 2017 — Liberty Media Group will change its corporate name to Formula One Group and retire its NASDAQ stock exchange ticker symbol “LMCA,” replacing it with “FWON.”

The Liberty Media Corp. name will live on, at least in the ether — Liberty Media Group is officially a tracking stock of Liberty Media Corp., along with Liberty Braves and Liberty Sirius, which will remain separate.

Malone, Liberty Media chairman, has spent the better part of the past decade breaking apart and spinning off the Liberty assets in a flurry of deals. Liberty Media, which used to house interests in major programmers like Discovery Communications and QVC, has long since spun those holdings out to shareholders.

DEALMAKER’S LATEST DEAL

The deal is the latest over the past three years by the mogul known for dealmaking, beginning with his purchase of a 27% interest in Charter Communications in 2013. In the wake of that deal, Malone helped engineer Charter’s $78.7 billion purchase of Time Warner Cable and its $10.4 billion buy of Bright House Networks.

Other Malone holdings have gone on international buying sprees, like Discovery Communications, which earlier this year bought sports network Eurosport in 2015 and European Olympics rights for the 2018-2024 games.

In addition, Malone was a key part of Lionsgate’s $4.4 billion purchase of premium channel Starz in June.

Liberty has been in pursuit of Formula One since 2014, when speculation was high Liberty would team with Discovery to buy a 49% interest in the racing icon for about $4 billion. That deal never materialized, but with the most recent transaction, Liberty will get control of one of the hottest properties in international sports.

Formula One splits its revenue between race promotions — it holds the FIA F1 World Championship, among other races — broadcasting, advertising and sponsorship, and other businesses including TV production, hospitality and licensing, according to Liberty. With revenue of about $1.8 billion in the past 12 months, Formula One said it has $9.3 billion in revenue under long-term contracts through 2026.

Liberty shareholders will own 35% of Formula One’s equity (including about 3.1% for Malone personally), with partner CVC Capital Partners controlling 65%. In addition, former 21st Century Fox executive Chase Carey, long a confidante of Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch, will become Formula One’s new chairman after the deal closes, replacing Nestle chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe. Controversial British financier Bernie Ecclestone, who built Formula One into a global operation after nearly 40 years, will remain as CEO.

In typical Liberty fashion, the deal is a complicated one. Liberty closed the first part of the deal on Sept. 7, purchasing an 18.7% stake in Formula One for about $746 million. In the second stage, expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2017, Liberty will purchase the remaining voting interest in the company for about $300 million in cash, $350 million in notes and by issuing about 138 million shares of stock worth about $2.9 billion.

On a conference call with analysts to discuss the transaction, Carey said he would build Formula One’s fan base by telling its story. Formula One already is one of the most popular sports properties in the world, with more than 400 million global viewers, but has had difficulty cracking the U.S. market, which is dominated by NASCAR stock car racing. But U.S. viewership is growing, up by about 40% since NBC Sports won domestic broadcast rights in 2013.

DIGITAL GROWTH OPPORTUNITY

Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei said on the call that the company believes there is opportunity to grow Formula One’s “underdeveloped” digital assets, adding that the company could grow its fan base and revenue through new technologies like virtual reality and via video games.

“There’s interest in this sport around the world,” Carey said on the call. “We want to continue to intelligently explore the opportunities and continue to grow it.”

Pivotal Research Group CEO and senior media & communications analyst Jeff Wlodarczak, called Formula One a “prototypical Malone investment” in that it has a high barrier to entry, a lasting business, evidenced by the $9.3 billion in long-term contracted revenue, and appears to have strong expansion opportunities.

“As we have seen with the NFL, you can expand your broadcast rights fees and create alternative distribution channels (national nets, to DirecTV [NFL] Sunday Ticket, to Thursday Night Football to the RedZone channel),” Wlodarczak wrote in an e-mail message. “They could also look into expansion of races from 21 to the current contractual limit of 25 (the U.S. could be a massive driver of growth long term), repricing of TV contracts materially higher, leveraging ‘sister’ Liberty companies [Liberty Global] and [Discovery’s] Eurosport, expanding digital opportunities.”

Liberty Media, ending years of speculation, said it will purchase racing icon Formula One from a consortium led by CVC Capital Partners for $4.4 billion.

Liberty Media headed by legendary dealmaker John Malone, has been in the hunt for the racing company since at least 2014.

According to Liberty, the transaction comprises cash and newly issued shares in the Liberty Media Group tracking stock and a debt instrument exchangeable into shares of LMCK. The transaction price represents an enterprise value for Formula One of $8 billion and an equity value of $4.4 billion.

In typical Liberty fashion, the deal isn’t an easy one. According to terms, Liberty will acquire 100% of Formula One parent Delta Topco by first buying an 18.7% interest in the unit for $746 million in cash. Former 21st Century Fox vice chairman Chase Carey has been named chairman of Delta Topco, succeeding Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, who will remain on Formula One’s board as a non-executive director. Bernie Ecclestone will remain Formula One’s CEO.

“I am thrilled to take up the role of Chairman of Formula One and have the opportunity to work alongside Bernie Ecclestone, CVC, and the Liberty Media team, Carey said in a statement. “I greatly admire Formula One as a unique global sports entertainment franchise attracting hundreds of millions of fans each season from all around the world. I see great opportunity to help Formula One continue to develop and prosper for the benefit of the sport, fans, teams and investors alike.”

After completion of the acquisition, Liberty Media will own Formula One and it will be attributed to the Liberty Media Group which will be renamed the Formula One Group. The consortium of sellers led by CVC will own about 65% of the Formula One Group’s equity and will have board representation at Formula One to support Liberty Media in continuing to develop the full potential of the sport. In addition, a CVC representative will be joining the Liberty Media Board of Directors.

“We are excited to become part of Formula One,” Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei said in a statement. “We think our long-term perspective and expertise with media and sports assets will allow us to be good stewards of Formula One and benefit fans, teams and our shareholders. We look forward to working closely with Chase Carey and Bernie Ecclestone to support the next phase of growth for this hugely popular global sport.”

The selling stockholders will receive a mix of consideration comprising: $1.1 billion in cash, 138 million newly issued shares of LMCK and a $351 million exchangeable debt instrument to be issued by Formula One and exchangeable into shares of LMCK. Upon completion of the acquisition, the Liberty Media Group will be renamed the Formula One Group and the ticker symbols for its shares will change to FWON. Formula One will remain based in London.

“I would like to welcome Liberty Media and Chase Carey to Formula One and I look forward to working with them,” Ecclestone said in a statement.

While analysts continue to pick apart Lionsgate’s $4.4 billion purchase of premium channel Starz, studio executives told analysts Thursday night the deal will be “transformative” for the movie studio and that pulling the trigger on the deal was not forced by media legend and Lionsgate and Starz shareholder John Malone.

Lionsgate agreed to purchase Starz on June 30, ending months of speculation around a deal. And though Lionsgate touted the deal as a win-win for both companies, some analysts have seen most of the benefits on the premium network side.

On a conference call with analysts to discuss fiscal first quarter results, Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer called the Starz deal “the largest and most transformative acquisition in our history. We've been looking at Lionsgate and Starz' respective operations, pipelines and platforms, exploring all the things we can do together, and I can tell you that we’re even more excited about the deal today than when we first announced it.”

And Lionsgate vice chairman Michael Burns dismissed speculation that Malone – who swapped a 4.5% stake in Starz for a 3.4% interest in Lionsgate last year – was pressuring the movie studio into a deal with the premium channel.

“John Malone thought these two assets would fit nicely together, he’s been saying that for a long time,” Burns said on the call. “But make no mistake: We wanted the Starz deal.”

Related:Inside the Curious Mind of John Malone

Starz has focused on original programming under CEO Chris Albrecht, and has had success with shows like Outlander, Power, Black Sails and The Girlfriend Experience. Lionsgate has been a force in TV production as well, producing past hits for other networks like Mad Men (AMC), Weeds (Showtime) and Nurse Jackie (Showtime) as well as current hits like Orange is the New Black (Netflix) and Casual (Hulu). Feltheimer said that Lionsgate will work closely with Albrecht (his office will be “five yards away” from the Lionsgate CEO’s), and Starz chief operating officer Jeff Hirsch to develop new ideas for programming. The ultimate goal, he said, is to create a brand defining show along the lines of Mad Men, Starz’s vast content library and thematic channels also are a huge benefit.

Related:Aligning Starz

“I think it's pretty obvious that having that kind of brand defining show would be great,” Feltheimer said. “I think people though do forget it, at Starz there's so much additional content going through – there’s branded channels like the Western channel which is one of the best watched channel on anybody's platform on the Encore side. They have huge libraries, [a] huge amount of movies and just some really great series already on the air as well as a number of others that are coming up and being considered that I've read and that are really terrific and premium. But, of course, again having that big monster hit on any platform is a game changer.”

As the private jets returned from Allen & Co.’s annual media mogul summer camp in Sun Valley, Idaho, last week, speculation around possible deals in the content sector grew louder.

Allen’s conference has been the petri dish for several huge media mergers over the past several decades — including The Walt Disney Co.’s 1995 purchase of Capital Cities/ABC, Comcast’s 2009 acquisition of NBCUniversal and Verizon Communications’s 2014 purchase of AOL.

And this year’s soirée comes at a pivotal point in the content business, as programmers contemplate adding scale to compete against heftier distributors like Charter Communications and Altice USA, as well as subscription video-on-demand services such as Netflix.

At the same time, boardroom turmoil at Viacom — Shari Redstone, a company director and Sumner Redstone’s daughter, was a much-watched figure at the Allen conference — could set the deal wheels moving at full speed. Analysts would like to see Viacom and its former bandmate CBS reunite, but there is also the possibility the parent of MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central could continue to go solo or attract the attention of a larger suitor, such as 21st Century Fox.

Consolidation has always been an option for programmers in a land of giant distributors. Most analysts expected a wave of deals after Charter made its first overtures to Time Warner Cable in 2013, starting with Fox’s aborted $80 billion takeover of Time Warner Inc.

MERGER FEVER RETURNS

Content merger fever waned in 2015, when stocks fell sharply over subscriber-loss concerns. But deal activity has begun to pick back up, with last month’s $4.4 billion Lionsgate-Starz merger and NBCUniversal’s $3.8 billion purchase of DreamWorks Animation.

Download "Media's Free Radicals," a guide to the content consolidation possibilities. 

According to research company Mergermarket, which tracks the number and value of media deals globally, 260 transactions worth $43.9 billion were announced in the first half of 2016, up 91% from the $23 billion announced in the same period in 2015. That pace is expected to continue.

Mergermarket TMT Group Sector editor Ed Mullane said in an interview last week that more deals will come in the wake of Starz-Lionsgate, as programmers look to insulate themselves from larger distributors demanding lower prices and skinnier packages, as well as SVOD companies that are pumping billions of dollars into original programming.

“Lionsgate and Starz is an example of two companies that didn’t have the scale to compete against the new players and the incumbent players,” Mullane said.

Netflix, which has committed to spend about $6 billion on content in 2016, also is driving consolidation talk, especially among smaller programmers.

“How are production companies going to compete against that?” Mullane asked. Bigger may be better.

THE LIONS’ DEN

Lionsgate, which many pundits see as cable legend John Malone’s latest consolidation vehicle — he owns 4.5% of Lionsgate and is the largest individual Starz shareholder — is expected to go back to the deal well. And it makes sense in that Malone’s hands are tied on the distribution-deal front, at least for the near term, as Charter focuses on integrating its $78.7 billion purchase of Time Warner Cable.

On a conference call with analysts after the Starz transaction was announced, Lionsgate vice chairman Michael Burns said the Starz deal “would not preclude us from additional acquisitions.”

Wunderlich Securities media analyst Matt Harrigan said he believes Lionsgate will reenter the deal fray within the next 18 to 24 months, but its potential targets are unclear. Movie studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is a possible target, as is Viacom’s Paramount Pictures, which is in the process of selling off a minority interest.

While in the past some pundits have pointed to another Malone holding — Discovery Communications — as a target, particularly because of its reality programming, that value diminished after Lionsgate’s purchase of Pilgrim Studios late last year.

For Harrigan, the most likely consolidation candidates are Viacom, CBS and Time Warner Inc., for two simple reasons: Viacom and CBS shouldn’t have been broken up in 2009 in the first place, and Time Warner’s corporate structure — it has no overly dominant shareholder — makes it ripe for a takeover.

Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, which abandoned its $80 billion pursuit of Time Warner Inc. back in 2014 after the Time Warner’s board of directors nixed that deal, could rethink another bid. Adding to the speculation is that Time Warner’s stock has fallen below the $85-per-share threshold of the old Fox bid.

Back in 2014, one of Time Warner’s biggest arguments against the merger was that it could surpass the per share valuation of the Fox off er, which it did for a period. But like other media stocks, Time Warner shares have fallen, as pressures from over-the-top and subscription video-on-demand providers and a weak advertising market have taken their toll.

Time Warner stock is up about 15% ($9.87 each) so far in 2016, but the shares are down 14.6% in the past 12 months. Like many programming stocks, Time Warner never fully recovered from the August 2015 sector bloodbath in the wake of Disney’s revelation that sports programmer ESPN had lost subscribers. It was also the last time that Time Warner shares traded above the $85-per-share mark Fox set in its aborted takeover bid.

Typically, weak stocks and readily available capital — despite the economy, debt is still cheap — lead to deals.

“The obvious target is Time Warner,” Mullane said. “It doesn’t have the ownership structure that large companies do. Everyone would target Time Warner.”

A Viacom-CBS deal makes sense in that adding broadcast network CBS could give cable programmer Viacom additional leverage during carriage negotiations. For CBS, the benefits are less evident, and Harrigan said that a recombination could attract attention from regulators.

“Gigantism can be a little unhealthy,” Harrigan said.

Adding to the fray is the emergence of several Chinese companies into the U.S. entertainment sector. Focus Media, a Chinese advertising and media conglomerate, has said it plans to invest heavily in sports and entertainment properties. Other players like e-commerce company Alibaba and conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group have focused on movie studios, but could turn their heads toward pay TV content.

Still, Harrigan said he doesn’t see an imminent combination of major media properties because of the regulatory angle. For example, he estimated that a Fox-Time Warner hookup would create a company that generates about 40% of total linear TV production through its 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. studios. That concentration, he said, has little chance of cutting the regulatory mustard.

Moreover, the top five programmers already have a “ridiculous amount of eyeballs,” Harrigan said, so adding another huge company to the mix doesn’t necessarily solve any problems.

Plus, with the advent of skinny bundles, consumers want packages of fewer channels, not more networks being forced on them from a mega-programmer with dozens of channels.

SMALL BUT MIGHTY

Indeed, for all of Malone’s emphasis on “free radicals” in the programming business, there’s no guarantee that bigger is better. Some of the most-watched and respected shows on TV are coming from smaller networks like AMC, which has the top-rated show on cable, The Walking Dead. AMC Networks CEO Josh Sapan said as much at last month’s Gabelli & Co. Movie & Entertainment conference.

“Big is better if it’s really good stuff, and big is worse and is a weight if it’s not really good stuff ,” Sapan said at the conference. “You would rather not have that weight because it will actually burden your fair reward for what you have that is performing.

“Scale’s good if the stuff punches at or above weight,” he added. “Scale’s bad if the stuff punches below weight.”

There is an argument for both philosophies, Harrigan said, adding that having multiple networks can help insulate a programmer from a chilly ratings spell.

“If you’re hot and you’re small, people want the content,” Harrigan said. “But if you hit a cold streak, you’re irrelevant.”

QVC Group CEO Michael George will be able to buy a lot more baubles, bangles and beads from the home shopping conglomerate he runs, raking in a total of $19.7 million in total compensation in 2015, according to a proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday. 

QVC is part of Liberty Interactive, one of several companies that have spawned from cable legend John Malone Liberty Media. QVC is the largest holding of Liberty Interactive, which also includes online retailer Zulily and Liberty Ventures, which holds online companies Bodybuilding.com, CommerceHub, Evite and Right Start and minority interests in Time Warner Inc. and other companies.

George’s 2015 compensation increase was mainly due to $17.5 million in stock option awards the CEO received in 2015. George received no option awards in 2014. His total 2014 compensation was about $1.99 million.

The option awards are tied to a new five-year employment deal George reached with the company in September. As part of that agreement, he was eligible to receive a one-time grant of 1.7 million options to purchase QVC shares at a strike price of $26 per share. Half of those options vest on Dec. 31, 2019 and the rest on Dec. 31, 2020.    

In contrast, Liberty Interactive president and CEO Greg Maffei took a pay cut in 2015, reaping a total of $14.87 million in total compensation, compared to the $32.5 million he received in 2014. Option awards were the difference for Maffei as well – he received $3.6 million in option awards in 2015 compared to $28.6 million in 2014.

Options also played a big role in compensation gains for several other executives. Chief financial officer Christopher Shean received $7.7 million in total compensation in 2015 (up from $893,368 in 2014), including $6.3 million in option awards. Senior vice president Albert Rosenthaler saw his total compensation rise to $7.6 million in 2015 from $828,111 in 2014, mainly on the basis of a $6.3 million option award.

Liberty media chairman and cable legend John Malone will receive the 2016 Steven J. Ross Humanitarian Award at the UJA-Federation of New York’s Leadership Awards Dinner on May 18.

The award honors the late former chairman of Time Warner Inc., a visionary and renowned philanthropist. Ross built a family funeral parlor business into Warner Communications, and created Time Warner Inc. in 1989 after merging with Time Inc. He died of prostate cancer in 1992. 

The event will take place at Cipriani in Manhattan and will feature a conversation between Malone and PBS newsman Charlie Rose and feature a performance by Country star Kenny Chesney.  

Among those attending will be IAC chairman Barry Diller, Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries, Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei, Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts, Discovery Communications CEO David Zaslav, LionTree Advisors CEO Aryeh Bourkoff, and many other industry and media leaders.

Cable history buffs will turn directly to Chapter 9, titled "A Matter of Trust," the longest chapter in Steve Case's book The Third Wave,hoping for some insights into the $163 billion merger of Time Warner into Case's America Online in 2000. They'll know that the deal quickly foundered, costing chairman/CEO Jerry Levin his job, vice chair Ted Turner (Time Warner's largest shareholder at that time) billions of dollars in lost value; and even giving Case a quick shove to the exit.

Case insists that the book, published this week, is not a memoir, but rather an upbeat guide to entrepreneurial opportunities. He quickly acknowledges that his book deliberately has the identical title as Alvin Toffler's landmark 1980 "Third Wave," which influenced Case's career goals when he graduated from college that year. And he delivers plenty of advice and ideas about launching a business, many of them appropriate to telecom and tech start-ups in cable-related ventures, such as the Internet of Things and tele-health.

Whereas Toffler's Information Age "wave" followed the centuries-long Agricultural and Industrial eras, Case's short chronology starts with "Building the Internet" (1985-1999, although he cites  earlier tech precursors) the "App Economy and Mobile Revolution" (2000-2015) and the upcoming "Internet of Everything." Interspersed with frequent - but not very deep - career disclosures, Case offers valuable tips about business-building in the new era, such as "the three P's": partnerships, policy and perseverance.    

To augment such useful tutorials, the book is laced with personal and some juicy remembrances of his youthful flings with cable and early online ventures.  The little-told story about efforts to persuade John Malone of Telecommunications Inc. to invest in AOL in the early '90s typically demonstrates Case's determination.  AOL wanted both money and a future broadband alternative to its dial-up system.  According to Case, Paul Allen was on the verge of becoming a 20% owner of AOL stock, and Microsoft was threatening with its impending Microsoft Network (MSN).   Case says he made a sweetheart offer to Malone, who was also being courted by Microsoft's Bill Gates to embrace MSN.

Ultimately, Malone ignored AOL and also walked away from MSN. Case says that much later Malone said he regretted missing out on the 20-fold AOL stock appreciation during the dot-com bonanza.

As for the stealthy Time Warner deal, there are few revelations.  Case acknowledges that with its cash trove and market valuation in late 1999, AOL scouted many acquisition possibilities, including Disney, AT&T (again for its broadband), Electronic Arts (for its games) and eBay.  In one of the few "juicy" tidbits, he describes how eBay CEO Meg Whitman "was waiting in adjacent conference room at our headquarters in Virginia" as a back-up deal if "the negotiation deteriorated with Time Warner."  He cites encouraging early chats with Turner and Case's own "absolute belief" that the deal would have worked out if the boom market had continued for a few more years than it did.

The rest of the chapter goes into the subsequent dysfunction of the merger, picking on the culture clashes and Time Warner's insular strategy.  He shares a few stories about his growing frustration with Levin, who held the reigns although Case was the nominal chairman, and with the fallout as Levin was shoved aside.  Case explains why former MTV chief Bob Pittman, briefly considered for the top TW job, was too short-sighted and that Dick Parsons, who eventually took to job, lacked vision.  Of course, as he has said in interviews and speeches, Case put most of the subsequent blame for the deal's ultimate failure on Parson's reorganization of the company. The restructuring  put Don Logan, a long-time Time Inc. magazine executive, in charge of AOL and Time Warner Cable, where he shunned  the online unit. Case skewers Logan for killing what Case believes were ahead-of-their-time projects, such as a pre-Skype communications feature because the existing cable group wanted to push the triple-play.

The book includes the requisite name dropping, from Ahmet Ertegun of Warner Music to "Barry" Obama, a Honolulu high-schoolmate and later the President who invited Case onto several federal entrepreneurial/start-up initiatives. Even Comcast CEO Brian Roberts is mentioned, although in a much later encounter (2015), when - reflecting on the core strengths of different companies - Roberts said, "The culture is the one thing you've got to get right."

And that concept, of course, is one of the underlying messages that Case seeks to promote throughout this self-help volume. After he gets the personal stories out of his system, Case emphasizes the tools that entrepreneurs should use. For example,  he believes that most future businesses will be touched by regulation, which is why "policy" is one of his building blocks. 

Whether it's Über dealing with local transportation rules, drones facing multiple levels of oversight or health and communications regulations, he encourages awareness of the growing role of government, which he considers a necessary burden.  Case offers tips about fund raising in an ecosystems with investment constraints (again: some policy-driven). There are plenty of marketing insights, drawing from his youthful experience as a Pizza Hut development manager, which involved taste-testing pizzas around the country. Barely a decade later, Case was calculating how AOL could run a guerrilla action that leveraged the online hubris of competitor Prodigy (the IBM/CBS/Sears venture).

Case engages in some deserved chest-thumping for his Revolution venture capital project and for the "Rise-of-the-Rest" campaign to encourage entrepreneurship in communities of all kinds -not just in Silicon Valley, the Boston area, New York and the other digital-magnet towns.  And he encourages curiosity and continuing dedication - even when it seems to fail.  He cites his own passion for new digital media after he read Toffler's "Third Wave": Case applied unsuccessfully to graduate business schools with a letter citing his firm belief that "innovations in telecommunications (especially two-way cable systems) will result in our television sets become in an information lifeline...."

Recognizing the short-attention-span community that he helped create, Case's conclusion starts with a shrug, "I won't take offence ...if you've decided to skim this book or skip to the end."  In truth, you can absorb this slim book on short flight: a shuttle along the coasts; or half-way to Denver from anywhere. (And that's even if you linger over photos of the victorious arm waves by Levin and Case on that momentous January 2000 morning.) 

The new "Third Wave" provides perspective for those of us who lived through the telecom rollercoaster of that era plus useful ideas for entrepreneurs who will create the next wave of things we didn't know we couldn't live without.

Charter Communications’s $78.7 billion merger with Time Warner Cable was expected from the onset to sail through the Federal Communications Commission approval process — unlike an earlier deal between Comcast and TWC that was abandoned because of regulatory concerns.

Lately, though, the combination of the second-largest cable operator (TWC) and the third (Charter) has drawn concern from state and federal officials who see the pairing as a means to concentrate power in the broadband industry. If the deal is approved, the new Charter would have 18.2 million high-speed Internet subscribers. Coupled with Comcast’s 23.3 million customers, the two would control nearly two-thirds of all U.S. broadband homes with available speeds of 25 Mbps or higher.

After a flurry of correspondence between the FCC and Democratic congressional leaders citing concerns about the deal’s impact, a Feb. 29 letter from Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) to chairman Tom Wheeler was its biggest threat yet. In a sternly worded letter expressing concern that new Charter would create a broadband duopoly the agency should look at closely, he ended the missive with this: “A competitive broadband marketplace is the only circumstance that will drive this outcome and until such a marketplace exists, further consolidation may pose a significant risk to consumers.”

None of the legislators are calling for an outright rejection of the deal, and most of the concerns are from veteran critics of consolidation who wouldn’t be expected to immediately bless any combination of broadband players. But Reid’s letter casts a shadow on the approval process.

“This will be a difficult letter for the FCC and DOJ to ignore and at the very least is likely to lead to a meaningful slowdown in the approval process, which appeared to be moving along rapidly toward closing,” BTIG media analyst Rich Greenfield said in a blog post.

The FCC is working toward a late March decision on the deal. Other analysts are puzzled that legislators are risking maintaining the status quo by rejecting it. No deal means no deal conditions, Pivotal Research Group CEO and senior media & communications analyst Jeff Wlodarczak said. And no conditions means no incentive to change.

Charter has already shown a willingness to compromise, and possible conditions being discussed center around various contractual relationships — like most favored nation clauses — and even a broadband overbuild condition that would require the new company to deploy high-speed Internet in markets where it does not now offer the service but a competitor does.

“The government has a chance to get something material from the TWC-Charter deal approval and I don’t believe they are dumb enough to blow it,” Wlodarczak said.

Still, in the increasingly unstable political environment of 2016, a deal implosion would irrevocably alter the industry in five distinct ways:

1. Comcast gets stronger, or is broken up: With its status as the No. 1 cable and broadband provider, and Nos. 2-3 not really allowed to get any bigger, Comcast would be the de facto — and permanent — king of the cable hill. The cable giant already had its best growth year in about a decade after abandoning TWC by focusing on organic growth. Comcast could use its programming clout to go over the top outside its footprint or use its broadband dominance to eliminate the competition inside its service territories.

By rejecting the combination of two companies that would be smaller than Comcast, is the government saying the No. 1 cable operator is too large? While most analysts believe it’s a long shot, political sentiment seems to be shifting away from a few dominant providers to several smaller ones that would nurture OTT development.

2. Charter gets weaker: With the government basically preventing them from gaining meaningful scale, Charter will have to focus on what it had originally planned before it set its sights on TWC — growing organically, although at a slower pace. And it will have to do that after paying TWC its $2 billion deal-breakup fee.

3. Time Warner Cable could emerge stronger: With its second major deal blocked by regulators, TWC could be in a prime position, flush with $2 billion in cash which could be used for operations or to fund share buybacks, and riding strong momentum from positive performance in the past four quarters.

4. John Malone must rethink his strategy: With Charter no longer hunting big M&A game, Malone will have to decide if U.S. M&A is worth pursuing with Charter or another operator, whether to focus his efforts on the international markets with Liberty Global (a possible Charter partner) or if he should just play wait and see.

5. The cable deal market disappears: The consolidation movement fueled by Charter grinds to a halt as the three largest cable operators won’t be allowed to get any bigger. Altice Group, which bought Suddenlink Communications and is in the process of acquiring Cablevision Systems, could make a play for TWC, but would face similar regulatory problems — it will be about the same size as Charter.

SIDEBAR: Broadband Domination

Legislators are getting increasingly concerned with the balance of power in the 70 million-customer U.S. broadband market, fearing that a combined Charter and Time Warner Cable would concentrate nearly two-thirds of broadband subscribers in two companies — new Charter and Comcast. (All numbers are as of the end of Q4.)

CompanyBroadbandCustomers

Charter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5.5 million

Time Warner Cable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12.7 million

Comcast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23.3 million

Total. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . . 41.5 million

SOURCE: Individual companies

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Credit Suisse co-head of EMEA investment banking Marisa Drew knew early on that she liked entrepreneurs.

She just didn’t want to be one.

Drew got a taste for investment banking early on through a two-year internship in New York fresh out of the University of Virginia, where she had earned an undergrad degree in finance.

At the end of that internship — which required that she go back to school to get her MBA before she was allowed to return — Drew felt that she hadn’t yet amassed enough life experience. So she began working in the then-nascent field of private equity.

It was there that she met her first Trumps (South African real estate moguls Eddie and Julius, not Donald), and, although she learned a lot, she thought the pace was too slow.

“In banking, you find yourself doing five or six live deals at a time,” Drew said. “Whereas, in private equity, you evaluate a large number of transactions, but you only bid on a small fraction of those deals and you only win a fraction of that. Private equity wasn’t for me.”

From there, Drew moved into the entrepreneurial space, tapped by a former colleague to run a chain of learning centers in the then-new computer education arena. While again learning a lot about running a successful business and being part of a chain that was growing rapidly, she found it had its drawbacks, too.

SEEKING ‘GOOD STRESS’

“Intellectually, I was no longer challenged once the business was up and running,” Drew said. “And I found there is good stress and bad stress. The stress of solely making every decision, and the daily pressure of making decisions that were life and death for the business, was oppressive stress for me. Plus, I really missed the energy and flow of the markets.”

When someone stepped up to buy the business, Drew went back to school, getting her MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and moved on to her next adventure. This time, she found herself back in investment banking, helping to capitalize early- growth companies, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s put her squarely in the middle of telecom and cable.

“Everything came together at that moment,” Drew said. “I just found the perfect job, and honestly, I never looked back.”

Drew engineered financings and deals in the United States, Canada and Latin America for Merrill Lynch and, in 1999, moved to London to help start up its leveraged finance practice. Four years later, in 2003, she was doing the same for Credit Suisse.

She has done several groundbreaking deals, including an exit financing for bankrupt U.K. cable operators NTL and Telewest that contemplated a merger between the two entities before it actually occurred — unprecedented at the time, but commonplace today. Later, Drew also developed a new financing structure for Liberty Global that allowed the cable giant to use fluctuations in its leverage ratio to finance acquisitions.

MALONE’S FAVORITE BANKER

Carving out that new ground won Drew and her team notice. Drew has been called Liberty Global chairman John Malone’s favorite banker in Europe, having done several deals for that company — including its $25.5 billion acquisition of Virgin Media — as well for European telecom giant Altice Group and countless others.

Drew also spends time mentoring women for banking careers and serving as co-chair of the Credit Suisse Diversity Leadership Council and as a trustee of the Credit Suisse Foundation. She is also the founder of the Competitors’ Diversity Forum and a member of the C200, an organization comprised of the top women in business globally.

Despite its reputation as a male-dominated environment, Drew said she believes banking has rewards like few others for women and men. Over the years, she helped build the first cable company in post-Communist Poland and financed the creation of a mobile telephone network in Medellin, Colombia, during the drug wars in that country, providing a communications infrastructure that improved the safety of citizens there.

“How do you put a price on that?” Drew said. “The fact that I feel that I had a hand in building whole industries, I don’t think women should shy away from that opportunity. If I can somehow impart the experience I’ve had or inspire someone to say, ‘This is a career I am thinking hard about and not dismissing it out of hand because on the surface, it seems like a career not suited to women,’ then I feel like I’ve done something to give back for the lucky successes I’ve had.”

Vodafone Group has confirmed it is in talks with John Malone’s Liberty Global concerning a joint venture in the Netherlands, one of the European cable giant’s strongholds.

The news of renewed talks come about five months after the pair ended discussions regarding an asset-swap – which most speculated involved their German businesses, one of Liberty’s biggest markets --  in late September. Liberty Global has made several recent moves to boost its Netherlands presence – it acquired the remaining interest it didn’t already own in Dutch cable company Ziggo last year and reaches about 90% of the homes in the country. A joint venture would make sense given that Liberty has been seeking to increase its mobile presence in Europe, offering a quad-play of video, voice, data and wireless primarily through Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) agreements.

Speculation in the European press has been high that Liberty Global and Vodafone had restarted talks, which prompted the Vodafone announcement.

“Following recent media speculation, Vodafone Group Plc ("Vodafone") confirms it is in discussions with Liberty Global Plc ("Liberty Global") regarding the creation of a joint venture in the Netherlands that would incorporate both companies’ local operating businesses,” the carrier said in a statement. “The discussions are ongoing and do not extend beyond the creation of a joint venture in the Netherlands. There is no certainty as to when or whether any transaction will be agreed.”

John Malone’s Liberty Global subsidiary Telenet is close to receiving European Union regulatory approval of its planned $1.4 billion purchase of Belgian wireless carrier Base Co. NV, according to reports.

Liberty first announced its intention to purchase Base in April. Base is the third largest wireless carrier in Belgium and is the first purchase of wireless assets in the country for Telenet, which had concentrated on MVNO agreements previously.

According to a Reuters report, Telenet has agreed to sell customers from its JIM Mobile brand and its 50% stake in Mobile Viking to rival wireless carrier Medialaan. The idea is to help the fledgling carrier become a more established MVNO carrier using Base’s network. The European Commission is expected to brief national competition authorities on the deal today (Jan. 21) and is expected to approive the deal ahead of its official March 17 deadline, Reuters added.

Telenet is the largest cable operator in Belgium with about 2.1 million customers and has been an active player in Belgium’s mobile market through an MVNO since 2006, and has about 977,000 mobile subscribers, compared to  3.3 million for Base.

Previously, Telenet said it expects to spend about $258 million to upgrade Base’s mobile network and support systems and to integrate its operations over the next few years.