When media moguls duke it out, what’s their battleground? Newspapers, evidently.

For the past week, EchoStar boss Charlie Ergen and Sirius XM radio’s CEO Mel Karmazin have been doing battle on the pages of two venerable dailies, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The Journal had a head start on the story, reporting how Ergen had started buying up Sirius debt in an attempt to force the satellite radio company into a deal. Then, it revealed how Ergen had actually made an offer to buy Sirius, which Karmazin rejected.

While the rest of the media was digesting all this, out came the Times with a story that said Sirius was preparing for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, which could come within days. It had even hired bankruptcy experts, the Times wrote. The Journal quickly swatted that idea down, saying:

“The hiring of bankruptcy and restructuring advisers, while not surprising given the company’s financial predicament, doesn’t mean a filing is imminent.”

It refined that idea in a story Wednesday night, taking a direct swipe at the Times’ reporting:

“This week, Sirius representatives responded to Mr. Ergen’s move by spreading word that the company was preparing to file for bankruptcy and had hired bankruptcy and restructuring advisers. Company officials also privately told investors that Sirius has entered a “zone of insolvency” and that a bankruptcy filing would be preferable to cutting a deal with Mr. Ergen, according to people who participated in the discussions.”

The New York Post has since gotten into the game, and all three papers reported on Wednesday the appearance of a “white knight” in the form of Liberty Media’s John Malone, who controls DirecTV.

With these papers probably taking turns to report the latest developments on this story, we’re all in danger of getting whiplash.

Keep an eye on:

• The Federal Communications Commission approved the spin-off of Time Warner Cable from Time Warner Inc. That can only be good news for Jeff Bewkes, who can now focus all his attention on selling off AOL. (Reuters)
• The merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster has raised political hackles, but the groups are out to defend. (Financial Times)
• The media’s love affair with Twitter, or at least writing about it, continues, with yet another takeout on the microblogging site. (The New York Times)

(P.S. A subscription may be required to access The Wall Street Journal stories.)

(Photo: Reuters)

Gawker/Valleywag created a bit of stir on the blogosphere Monday with its report that Yahoo was in talks to buy blogging startup Tumblr for “low to mid-eight figures,” or as much as $50 million.

From the post:

We hear the talks are serious, led by Tapan Bhat, a fast-rising executive in charge of Yahoo’s homepage and other key properties — but as with any acquisition talks, they could fall apart.

We figured Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz was too busy figuring out where Yahoo should seek growth and how to stem the leaky ship to pursue an acquisition. Sure enough, Silicon Alley Insider knocked down the Valleywag story by getting Tumblr founder David Karp on the record:

We called David and he said the rumor is categorically false. “We’re just hearing about this now,” he said.

Speaking of acquisitions, it seems like no one’s doing too well with the stuff they’ve bought. Just a couple of days ago, News Corp wrote down the value of its $5.6 billion 2007 acquisition of Dow Jones. And yesterday, Cablevision said it would write down its acquisition of Newsday by $375 million to $450 million. As you may remember, Cablevision bought the Long Island paper just last year for $650 million.

• The recession has taken a heavy toll on sales of celebrity gossip magazines, but magazine circulation in general has held up well, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. (NYTimes)
• Google has developed a free Web service called PowerMeter for consumers to track energy use in their house or business. (NYTimes)
• DirecTV Group added more subscribers than expected during the fourth quarter but rising marketing costs and other expenses dragged down its quarterly profit. (Reuters)
• Omnicom Group shows more resilience to budget cutbacks than Wall Street had expected, but profit still falls 14 percent. (Reuters)

Sports fans in the US will now have the chance to cheer fours and sixes as much as home runs.

Satellite TV service provider DirecTV Group plans to step off the baseball diamond and onto the pitch by bagging broadcast rights for big-ticket cricket tournaments in 2009.

With an Asian Indian population pushing 3 million in the US, DirecTV is assured of a loyal fan following. Indians are crazy about the game, with the country boasting the largest global cricket audience. Cricketers are feted like pop stars and tote multi-million-dollar sponsorship deals.

DirecTV’s fare includes the one-year old smash hit Indian Premier League (IPL) – which features the shorter Twenty20 version of the game. The money-spinning IPL has caught the imagination of not only fans but also Bollywood superstars and companies who have paid millions of dollars to buy franchisee teams.

In partnership with Willow TV Inc, DirecTV inked multi-year agreements giving it broadcast rights to offer marquee tournaments like the International Cricket Council’s  World Cup in 2011 as well as other keenly followed tours and tournaments.

Beginning Feb. 11, U.S. cricket fans can purchase tours at $299.99 for the full season, or at $199.99 for the IPL & ICC World T20 packages, DirecTV said.

The fanfare in the US will start tonight at Times Square in New York with cricket promos running on the Reuters screens in the evening.  

(Writing and reporting by Savio D’Souza)

(Photo: Reuters)

Wall Street sell-side analysts seemed to be unsurprised by AT&T’s decision to pick DirecTV as its video marketing partner for its version of the ‘triple play’ package, in regions where it hasn’t built out its U-verse digital service.

The final decision had seemed obvious to analysts after DISH said earlier this month that AT&T would extend its five-year relationship by just one month to Jan 31.

But what does it mean for the independent DISH and its maverick founder/CEO Charlie Ergen (pictured), with the No. 2 U.S. satellite TV provider already struggling with customer losses in a tough economy?

Here’s what a few analysts say:

Craig Moffett, Sanford Bernstein.

The announcement is a clear negative for Dish Network, and a major win for DirecTV. As a result, we now expect Dish Network to post a sizable (400,000) subscriber loss for full year 2009. We had previously expected approximately flat net growth. For DirecTV, we now expect a gain of 800Kwhere previously we had expected approximately half that.

Ingrid Chung, Goldman Sachs:

While the loss of the AT&T contract should have a positive impact on 2009 free cash flow for DISH (due to subscriber acquisition costs), DISH will be somewhat strapped to do any investing in its own business for the next several months. DISH has $1 billion in debt maturities coming due Oct 1 and has no revolver in place. While DISH can pay down this debt (and $500 million for the AT&T convert) through cash and investments - $1.8 billion at 6/30/08 - DISH will have limited capital to invest in its mobile video initiative or build out its direct sales channel.

But one analyst sees an investment opportunity despite DISH’s troubles.

Todd Mitchell, Kaufman Bros

The net impact of this deal will be to negatively impact DISH’s gross adds while putting greater pressure on churn. However, given DISH’s rather dismal operating performance recently we have already handicapped it pretty heavily. DISH’s performance should improve regardless of AT&T.

(Photo: Reuters)

Keep an eye on:

• WPP, the world’s second largest advertising group, has extended its 1.2 billion-pound    ($2.2 billion) offer for market-research company TNS again, TNS said it continued to recommend shareholders reject the bid (Reuters)
• Goldman Sachs cuts European media companies to reflect greater debt concerns and worsening macro economic outlook, especially in the UK and Spain. (Reuters)
• U.S. newspaper publisher McClatchy Co said it amended a credit agreement with its lenders helping it to avoid defaulting on its debt. (Reuters)

A couple of years ago, if you had suggested TiVo and DirecTV would ever kiss and make up — after DirecTV dumped TiVo in favor of DVRs by NDS (then a cousin in the News Corp Family) — you might have said it was as likely as “90210″ coming back to TV.

Well one day after the new “90210” premiered on the WB network, TiVo and DirecTV said they are working on a new HD TV set-top box. The agreement puts TiVo in a position to turn a bigger portion of DirecTV’s 16+ million customers into TiVo subscribers, in a deal that TiVo says will reap more in fees than previous agreements.

Reuters spoke to TiVo CEO Tom Rogers about the deal.

Reuters: This is kind of like getting back together with your first love.
Rogers: I’ve been saying for a long time that with DirecTV’s ownership by Liberty Media, it created a new atmosphere and a new environment. I think the management of DirecTV has always been supportive of TiVo and believes that we can put together a very exciting offering.

Reuters: DirecTV is still going to offer generic DVRs to its subs?
Rogers: We are comfortable with that. We recognize that generic DVRs will continue to exist. The biggest contributors to confusion between what is Tivo and what is “DVR” has been mass distributors themselves and obviously the more deals we do the more people have interest to make sure that there is a DVR offering and then something very different that is TiVo.

Reuters: DirecTV TiVo users don’t pay fees to TiVo directly. Is this deal lucrative for you?
Rogers: It was very a successful arrangement for us. There is a lot of financial upside.

Reuters: You are still in court with EchoStar, the other satellite provider. Do you see a time when you will make a similar deal with them?
Rogers: We kind of have a three-pronged strategy: Our go it alone route, our join ‘em route, which is what you could say this is, and our fight ‘em route, which is what EchoStar is. We are getting to the end of the enforcement stage in our fight with EchoStar. Tomorrow we are back in front of the judge for a hearing (related to an injunction and damages).

Reuters: Is TiVo close to the point when that kind of fighting is over?
Rogers: Three years ago I think the view of TiVo is that it had been totally commoditized, that other DVRs were out there and that TiVo, other than a brand name, didn’t have a meaningful distinction. Over the past year we have regained that mantle of innovation, of pioneer. We continue to lead the way on features and giving people a sense of controlling their own destiny on television consumption. We have a lot of work to do but I think we have made enormous progress.

Reuters: But your subscriber gains have still been flat lately. When is there an upturn?
Rogers: When Comcast begins to kick into full gear, and as the DirecTV product becomes available — we have been dialing back our marketing expense on the standalone front…we think all that will kick in to meaningful subscriber growth.

(Photo: Reuters)

You can think what you like about the management of DISH Network Corp, the second largest U.S. satellite TV operator, but they’re nothing if not refreshingly frank about the economy, the state of the market and their competitors’ tactics.

Of course, a lot of that has to do with the disarming candor of founder and Chief Executive Charlie Ergen, whose conference calls tend to avoid the sort of obfuscation and Orwellian double-speak the media and investors have to come expect from C-level executives in corporate America.

Ergen had to be especially blunt today on a day his company announced a loss 0f 25,000 subscribers, which according to Bernstein Research’s Craig Moffett, was its first ever loss of subscribers.

On competition:

 (There are) really competitive offerings in the marketplace, as the biggest being probably the phone companies and FiOS and U-verse, where there are a lot of introductory offers out there that I think they had about close to 350,000 net additions in the second quarter so they’re taking those some from us and some customers from others. Obviously in the Hi-Definition front we haven’t been as competitive as we would have liked in the second quarter, particularly versus DirecTV.

On AT&T ending a joint marketing partnership and calling for the repayment of a $500 million investment:

They contractually were allowed to do that. Our loan from them was at 3 percent interest, probably their (AT&T) CFO looked at that and made a very logical decision to say ‘we can probably do better with that money’. Their operations people probably said that we’re probably in a better position to have flexibility going forward in video, if we want to stay with a satellite partner, it would be better to talk to multiple partners than one and see what the best deal out there is. So we have to be ready as a company.

On on-going litigation between DISH and TiVo which might impact 4 to 6 million DISH subscribers if the satellite company loses:

What we did was we designed around the TiVo patent and patent law encourages people to be innovative and our guys were very innovative and used some very sophisticated algorithms and so fourth to design around the TiVo patent. I believe we’ll prevail but TiVo, we’re going to have conversations with TiVo one way or the other about how we work together, and again, I’m just stubborn. I know this case inside and out. I’ve sat through trials. I’ve sat through the engineering models. I’ve sat and had the best and the brightest explain this to us, and I’m just stubborn. We don’t violate their intellectual property today, and I want to prove that. And so we’re going to go to the September 4th hearing and see who is right and so far, TiVo has been right.

On the management’s role in the subscriber losses:

We really haven’t done as good a job executing for the last year and the second quarter is the first quarter we made progress, and that is kind of the first step, and again it’s all my fault. I really wasn’t on top of this business from an operational point of view as well as I should have been but as I got into it and I traveled around and I saw our operations the first thing was we really had to make sure we had the right people in the right place and that was done pretty much in the end of the first quarter … (In the) third quarter we’ll do a better job and fourth quarter we’ll do a better job.

(Photo: Reuters)

So who’s winning the pay-TV so far this year? With days to go until two of the biggest cable operators (Time Warner Cable on Wednesday and Comcast on Thursday)  report first quarter financial results, Reuters canvassed eight Wall Street analysts for their estimates of subscriber net additions during the period.

At first glance it doesn’t look like it will be a good quarter with these analysts forecasting Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision to lose around 100,000 basic TV subscribers collectively, while satellite TV plays DIRECTV Group and DISH Network will add around 320,000.

Even more worrisome for cable companies?  AT&T and Verizon added around 410,000 new TV subscribers between them during the quarter.

Yet at least one analyst cautions investors  not to read too much into cable’s basic video subscriber losses as this metric is not as important to growth as the addition of other revenue generating units in particular Internet access and phone.

“It would be missing the point to focus on basic video subscriber adds,” says Chris Marangi, an analyst at Gabelli & Co. which holds shares in Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision as well as the two satellite TV companies.

“Voice services and high speed data subscribers is what drives revenue growth,” says Marangi.

(Photo: Reuters/Glenn Britt (l), Brian Roberts (r))