TV Guide Sees Expansion For Betting Through TVG Network
Dow Jones News Service ~ March 16, 2000 ~ 10:55 pm EST
By Tom Locke
VAIL, Colo. (Dow Jones)--TV Guide Inc. (TVGIA) plans to have Television Games Network, its horse racing network, legally available for interactive wagering in eight to nine states by the end of the year, said Chief Financial Officer Craig Waggy Thursday.
If Kentucky is any indication, the network could have a good future. Results in the home state of Churchill Downs showed that for those households wagering through the network, an average of $1,366 was wagered per month per household, said Waggy in a presentation at the Janco Partners Institutional Investor Conference in Vail.
With Television Games Network, known as TVG, receiving 5.5% of the amount wagered, that translated to $75.13 per household per month. Plus TVG received an average of $12.50 a month in transaction fees, for a total of $87.63 a month per household going to TVG.
Waggy warned that Kentucky is probably not a typical market for horse-race gambling. Even so, if the betting is $650 per month per wagering household, TVG figures it can break even with 200,000 wagering households, according to a Feb. 16 report by Janco Partners analyst Stacy Forbes.
Waggy sees TVG as a boost for the horse racing industry. Kentucky, Oregon and Maryland already allow interactive wagering through the network, and the programming is becoming more widely distributed. It is available to 1.9 million C-band (big-dish satellite) subscribers, and in November TVG signed an affiliation agreement with EchoStar Corp.'s (DISH) direct broadcast satellite network that makes the programming available to all of EchoStar's 3 million subscribers, Forbes said in her report. Plus TVG has signed an affiliation agreement with a programming subsidiary of AT&T Corp. (T) that could potentially cover 18 million subscribers, she said.
In October, Gemstar International Group (GMST), of Pasadena, Calif., and TV Guide, of Tulsa, Okla., announced that Gemstar had agreed to buy TV Guide for $ 7.7 billion in stock. Shareholders of the companies vote Friday, March 17, on the deal.
-By Tom Locke; Dow Jones Newswires; 303-293-9294
(END) DOW JONES NEWS 03-16-00
10:55 PM |
