Updated: Liberty Media president and CEO Greg Maffei devoted the formal part of his UBS session to Starz Entertainment but most of the questions kept cjoming back to whether or not the company can close a deal with News Corp. for DirecTV. No real news there although Maffei did say later he’d like to keep Chase Carey as the top exec and has talked to Carey; no details about what they’ve discussed.
Starz, Vongo: The subscription video service is on track to offer download-to-own in early 1Q07. (An exec said later it likely would start with content Starz owns.) After the session, Maffei admitted Vongo doesn’t have a large number of subs now — no specifics — and he doesn’t expect a lot in that regard from the upcoming download service for a while. It’s about capturing the leading edge users first while preparing for a larger audience to be able to take advantage through more devices, etc.
Early contender for line of the day: Maffei on comments by News Corp. COO Peter Chernin here earlier this week: “I think I’ll let Peter do the talking for everybody; that seems to be News’ specialty.”
Update: The Journal, citing unnamed sources, is reporting that Liberty Media and News Corp. finally are nearing the surface of what was beginning to look like a black hole. News Corp. would buy Liberty’s $11 billion stake in the company in exchange for 38.6 percent of DirecTV Group, throwing in cash and some other assets. Liberty wouldn’t have hard control, as Maffei noted earlier today, but it would have effective control of the satellite TV company and a distribution outlet of its own.
NYT: Richard Siklos says the deal — he says it amounts to a “huge share buyback” — includes three regional sports nets and $550 million in cash. His sourcve is a banker. One source warned the two have come close before and pulled away but “others said this was the first time the men actually agreed on terms. A full legal agreement is expected to be signed and announced within two weeks.” After months of talks, he says it largely was concluded over the past day. The sports nets are a kinf of tax lagniappe — to be tax-free the deal has to include a business worth more than 5 percent of the deal that has been operated by News Corp. for five-plus years.
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