Tech wrap: Liberty Media eyes Nook e-reader
Some see e-readers as the poor cousin to more glamorous tablets, but that may soon be about to change. Billionaire media mogul John Malone, whose Liberty Media owns DirecTV Group and the QVC shopping channel, may be interested in buying the Barnes & Noble chain specifically for its Nook e-reader, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking behind the deal.
The Nook is now the second biggest e-book seller, behind Amazon, which only yesterday announced is now selling more e-books than print books. With Liberty as a backer, Barnes & Noble and the Nook may be well positioned to compete against Amazon and Apple.
Hackers set their sights on Sony – again, this time hacking into the company’s Internet service provider So-Net, stealing virtual points worth $1,225 from account holders. This after Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported that Sony was considering re-starting its U.S. based online games service on Tuesday, after shutting it down last month when the company discovered hackers had accessed the accounts of more than 100 million users.
An explosion at a Foxconn factory in China shook Apple shares slightly, sending them one percent lower after local news media said the factory was involved in the production of the iPad2.
And the Reuters Global Technology Summit wrapped up with word that American consumers can soon expect to swipe their cellphones to pay for things as companies will soon begin to roll out their “virtual wallet” technology.
But don’t expect to swipe your smartphone for the latest tablet. “Right now we are looking at areas around low value transactions, as we’re trying to see what consumers want and how much they feel comfortable with, says James Rees from Orange, which launched launched Britain’s first mobile payments service today.
Sun Valley: Jane Goodall and the primary primates
It’s day three of the Sun Valley media conference and the event has started to feel like a Jane Goodall documentary, in which we’re Jane and the moguls are the apes who have become comfortable letting us observe and record their movements. Several media executives groggily making their way to the morning’s first session (scheduled to kick off at 7:30), stopped to chat with the throng of press waiting to greet them.
Liberty Media Chairman John Malone voiced concerns about the economy for nearly 10 minutes while NBC’s Jeff Zucker, who once warned of the risks to media companies of trading analog dollars for digital pennies and later upped the exchange rate to dimes, posited the idea that the media industry was now within reach of collecting digital quarters. It’s change we can believe in.
Later on Thursday, Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt (who for reasons unknown has been toting a camera with a beefy zoom lens throughout the event, even after-hours at the bar on Wednesday evening) will hold his traditional Sun Valley press roundtable, possibly with co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who are here.
As for Steve Jobs, it appears that he is a no-show.
And while hoops superstar Lebron James mingled with the executives at Sun Valley last year, he will probably end up overshadowing the gathering of media bigwigs from afar this year when he announces his choice of a new home team on Thursday night.
(John Malone does his media thing at Sun Valley. Photo: Reuters)
from DealZone:
DirecTV adds to media merger excitement
With media titans GE and Vivendi still negotiating a deal to bring cable operator Comcast into a mega-media joint venture, a management move at DirecTV is giving dealwatchers a fresh programming alternative.
Yinka Adegoke and Sinead Carew report the appointment of PepsiCo veteran Michael White (pictured below), who has no experience in pay TV, as DirecTV CEO is being read as a sign the company's parent, Liberty Media, just wants a baby-sitter until its sells the operation in the next couple of years.
Telecom leaders Verizon and AT&T approached Liberty earlier this year, they report. Both have cross-marketing deals with DirecTV and would leapfrog the rest of the market with the addition of DirecTV's subscriber base. But fears of insurmountable regulatory resistance put those talks on ice.
Liberty Media shareholders are set to vote this morning on a plan to split DirecTV from Liberty Entertainment -- a move that Wall Street believes could pave the way for a telephone company to put in a bid for DirecTV, leading to a similar bid for smaller rival Dish Network.
If Comcast gets its content pipeline connected to NBC Universal, the pressure on the telcos to boost subscribers could get them to test the regulatory waters again.
Sun Valley: Ken Auletta paints it, black
Allen & Co’s Sun Valley media and technology conference forbids journalists from attending the morning sessions that executives and other media power players attend before they go out to play and talk about deals in the afternoon. That means the last, best hope they have is to get the low-down from a journalist who was invited.
There’s no pride in it, but at least you hear what happened from a reliable source.
In this case, that’s Ken Auletta, New Yorker media writer and author of several books about the media business. He moderated a panel about surviving in the digital age.
The answer? No answer, Auletta said.
Among the big minds pondering the issue were IAC/InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller, Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger (who on Tuesday told reporters that he’s not worried about how to get people to pay for content) and Liberty Media Chairman John Malone.
Questions asked at the session, Auletta said: How do you “monetize” on the Web? Can you? Is your “brand” an advantage?
Twitter, which is one of the media-anointed darlings of this year’s session, was also up for discussion, Auletta said. According to him, Diller said he was pessimistic about Twitter’s chances of making money. Auletta quoted Diller as saying it’s about “how to advertise in a way that doesn’t feel like an interruption.”
Sun Valley: A Who’s Who in pictures
Nearly every powerful media and technology executive you can think of will be camping out in the idyllic and affluent ski resort town of Sun Valley this week. Here are just a few…
Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, Michael Larson of Cascade Investments and Ron Meyer, president and COO Universal Studios arrive at the Sun Valley Inn.
Fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg and her husband Barry Diller, chairman and CEO of IAC/InterActivecorp, arrive at the Sun Valley Inn with Eric Eisner.
Philippe Dauman, CEO of Viacom, arrives at the Sun Valley Inn with his wife Debbie
Dish’s Charlie Ergen: Me and Mel don’t have a beef
Ah the media, we love a ruckus. We really do. And when the two pugilists are characters as colorful and savvy as Dish Network’s founder Charlie Ergen (left) and Siriux XM Satellite Radio CEO Mel Karmazin (right) we do really get excited.
If you remember, Ergen was widely reported last month to have made a back door bid to take a stake in Sirius XM by quietly buying up some of the satellite radio company’s outstanding debt. Analysts and experts came up with all kind of theories as to Ergen’s ambitions including taking complete control of Sirius on the cheap, combining various satellite assets, and kicking Mel out.
At the time Ergen ‘s official channels at Dish and EchoStar declined to comment on the matter. So today’s Dish earning call was the first time we heard from the man himself on the matter. Well, it turns out the press was right on most things connected with the Sirius bid, according to Ergen. Except for one thing: he does not have bad blood with Sirius CEO Karmazin.
Here’s Ergen from the conference call:
I would take this opportunity to say one thing that clearly was not true is there wasn’t, at least I can speak for my end, there’s no annimosity toward Mel, Parsons [former XM chair] or anything like that.
I don’t know where they got that. Certainly not from our side.
Really?
Maybe the stories of an old feud were overplayed, but there might have something other than pure cold financial logic that influenced Mel’s final decision on this deal. Liberty Media beat Ergen in the bid for a stake in the beleaguered satellite radio business by offering to pay off Sirius’ due loans. In an interview with Reuters shortly after winning the Sirius bid last month, Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei implied there may have been some… ahem, personality issues in its favor.
Liberty: Stern is safe — for now
So after two weeks of following all the twists and turns of Sirius XM’s attempts to avoid bankruptcy, CEO Mel Karmazin decided on John Malone, founder of Liberty Media, to come in as Sirius XM’s white knight with a $530 million loan . The loan will cover the satellite radio provider’s looming debt and help it avoid bankruptcy. As part of the deal Liberty will eventually take a 40 percent stake in Sirius’ equity.
But does this mean the big money deals that Karmazin signed with the likes of Howard Stern, Oprah Winfrey and Major League Baseball will get re-worked at a more favorable rate for the company now that there’s a new major stakeholder?
No, says Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei in an interview with Reuters.
You can look and say some of these content deals were cut at a time when there were two guys (Sirius and XM) bidding against each other in a relative frenzy. Having said that, a lot of these content relationships like Howard Stern are very valuable to this company, have been important in building the company, and are likely to be important in sustaining it.
But Stern isn’t quite out of the woods.
I’ll rely on Mel and his team to think about how those content relationships look going forward and make the right decisions,” said Mafffei. “All those content (deals) have some term and they’ll get renegotiated or reset at that time for the value that they’re then creating.
With Sirius generating net operating losses which hit $217 million in the third quarter, it would make sense that Liberty might suggest that Karmazin looks at trimming one of its biggest outgoing cashflows: talent costs. But Mafffei seems not to agree.
I too would probably dump SiriusXM without Stern. That said, I do love the music channels and also tuning into Foxnews during breaking news. It would be harder without Stern.
Sirius XM shares are — wait for it — higher!
Sirius XM shareholders have seen a lot of dark days — face it, we’re talking about a stock that dropped to 15 cents a share. But today isn’t one of them. At least so far.
Indeed, shares of the satellite radio company jumped 100 percent after Liberty Media Corp agreed to lend it $530 million, allowing Sirius XM and its leader, Mel Karmazin, to sidestep a debt crisis.
The deal comes after a breathless week during which Sirius XM came under threat from EchoStar Corp and its top man Charles Ergen, a longtime rival of Karmazin, and looked very close to bankruptcy.
Now, Liberty Media Corp and yet another media mogul, John Malone, have come to the rescue. Here’s the deal, according to Reuters:
Under the agreement, Liberty would first provide a $280 million senior secured loan to Sirius XM, of which $250 million would be funded on Tuesday to help the satellite radio company repay $171.6 million in convertible notes maturing today.
New York Times needs more than cash
Cash is king for the New York Times right now.
The media world has been swirling with talk about the company looking to sell The Boston Globe and its stake in the Red Sox. Now comes news that the company has told securities regulators that it may sell shares or other securities to raise cash.
Remember, the New York Times has a $400 million credit line due next May. It also is borrowing $225 million against its Manhattan headquarters. The company has made other moves to conserve cash, including cutting its dividend by nearly 75 percent.
But raising cash isn’t all that easy in this environment. Yesterday two Boston businessmen denied they were interested in buying The Boston Globe or the Red Sox stake, and selling shares would only put more pressure on an already depressed stock price. Besides, while cash will buy the New York Times some breathing space, it hardly solves the long-term problems that are crushing the newspaper business.
Here’s the take from Silicon Alley Insider:
Any cash the New York Times raises in the current environment will be outrageously expensive. It’s also hard to imagine that the company will attract much interest from equity investors until it can articulate a plan for long-term survival that involves something other than selling off non-core assets (eventually, it will run out of these).
the new york times is sadly confused by the bubble it lives in.irrespective of a persons political stance if the news was reasonably balanced them moderate conservatives like myself would probably read it. because of it,s obvious preference for propaganda it loses any creditability.
any resemblance of impartiality or any interest of being purveyors the news is gone, like wise it,s longevity.
AOL changes look, opens email, gets more social
AOL has relaunched with a redesigned page. It has also unveiled a new ‘every email’ feature that allows consumers to access multiple email services and integrates access to social networking sites.
Effectively AOL is getting more ‘social’ by allowing users to access not just AOL and AIM email on their AOL page but also Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail. Paid Content points out that Hotmail is not directly accessible through AOL.com, so AOL is providing a link that can be inserted in one of the module email slots and and a link to Microsoft feedback so people can ask for the feature.
In addition to being more open, AOL hopes the email aggregation will help recapture some of the user attention it lost before people leaving the ISP were allowed to keep their AOL addresses – Paid Content.
AOL said that over the next eight weeks, it will launch tools and features to further personalize the page. This means opening up AOL.com to third party content and services for the first time, including networking feeds like Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and Twitter.
Personalized Web pages like Netvibes or Pageflakes or even Google’s iGoogle and Yahoo’s MyYahoo have become more popular for users.
“For a portal to be relevant to consumers today, it has to recognize that users seek a variety of different experiences and connections with their various networks and information sources,” said Bill Wilson, AOL’s executive VP of programming.
Keep an eye on:
I’m more confident about Yahoo making a resurgence with these new personalized features that I am AOL. Not that I think AOL’s going to die off or anything, but nor would I expect great things.
