In the continuing series of media-merger hurricanes, here's one that looks like a Category 3 (big, complex, with at least one extraordinarily windy character near the eye of the storm): Barry Diller's Home Shopping Network is merging with Universal Studios Inc.'s TV operations in a deal worth US$4.075 billion.
The main exchange in the transaction: Home Shopping Network will get most of Universal's USA Network operation, which includes the Science Fiction Channel. Universal will get a 45 percent stake in a new venture to be headed by Diller and called USA Networks Inc. Liberty Media, a division of cable company Tele-Communications Inc. and a Home Shopping Network investor, will get a 15-percent piece of the new firm and the right to expand that to 25 percent. Also as part of the deal, Diller is expected to take a seat on the board of Seagram Co. Ltd., Universal's parent.
The new company will include three cable networks, 25 broadcast stations, Ticketmaster, and the Internet Shopping Networks.
For Diller, a longtime ABC and Paramount executive who was first chief of Fox Television before leaving the airwaves for cable, the merger is just the latest in a skein of sometimes joltingly ambitious deals or attempted deals. In 1995, he tried and failed to combine his QVC cable-shopping venture with CBS and also fell short in a bid to buy Paramount studios).
Diller's latest programming project, announced in September, is to launch a series of TV news channels around the United States. The man whose most instantly identifiable contribution to American culture is Married, with Children said he wants to smash the vapid, blow-dried clone model of local news.
