Thanks Jim,
This article is important not because of anything Mr. Barton wants to do with the internet, but more importantly look what Liberty Media can do for ACTV.
STAY TUNED
Peter Barton hopes to bring his cable TV programming expertise to the Internet.
By Deborah Claymon
Peter Barton is the very model of a media mogul. Mr. Barton, who served for seven years as president of Liberty Media, the program development arm of Tele-Communications Incorporated (TCI), likes to conduct meetings while bumping along the slopes in Vail, Colorado. (Mr. Barton supported himself after college by winning freestyle ski competitions.)
Mr. Barton stunned the cable industry in April with his resignation from Liberty, which he had grown into the world's largest provider of cable TV programming. He had negotiated--often on skis--media deals that resulted in more than 90 programming ventures. Since leaving Liberty, he has uncharacteristically avoided the spotlight, inciting a flurry of speculation about his next adventure. But in a departure, Mr. Barton submitted to an interview with The Red Herring at his home in suburban Denver.
Prime time
Mr. Barton's house is a shrine to his obsessions. There are three CPUs in the living room alone, two of which are connected to a television system that practically parodies convergence: a 40-inch TV that receives 1,000 digital cable channels, three satellite feeds, and two forms of Internet delivery. "It's my job to know what's on television at all times, everywhere," explains Mr. Barton.
Digital content has become increasingly important to Mr. Barton. Somewhat mysteriously, he's been spending a lot of time in Silicon Valley. "I'm looking to do something like Liberty but with entertainment software companies," he says. The Liberty model, whereby the company funded a consortium of cable programming developers and also developed its own independent networks and shows, certainly proved successful once. It made almost all of its associated entrepreneurs multimillionaires, including Mr. Barton.
When Mr. Barton joined TCI in 1982, he was one of only four executives. Together, they acquired roughly one cable company a week for four years. Even with their acquisitions, Mr. Barton and CEO John Malone realized that there was a dearth of good television content and that they needed to catalyze the development of new programming to succeed. In 1986 Mr. Barton moved to Minneapolis to oversee the TCI investment he describes as his first "out-of-the-park financial home run": QVC, the home shopping channel.
Returning to TCI three years later, he started Liberty as an effort to clean out the "bits and pieces" from TCI's years of acquisition and somehow turn them into a profitable, co”perative enterprise. Mr. Barton structured the company as a group of decentralized ventures run by entrepreneurs motivated by equity stakes. "We actually made it attractive for entrepreneurs to work for us. Suddenly we were in the business of making entrepreneurs really rich," he says. Liberty's entrepreneurs include Bob Johnson of Black Entertainment Television; media giant Barry Diller, chairman and CEO of HSN (the owner of the Home Shopping Network); and John Hendricks, founder of the Discovery Channel.
Liberty was spun off from TCI in 1990 and went public in 1991. It is now back in TCI's hands, although its shares trade independently (Nasdaq: LBTYA).
A taste of freedom
Mr. Barton blames his departure from Liberty on a short attention span. "It's a vast world," he says. "Why not taste some more?"
His second course will be similar to his first. His initial goal is to aggregate a group of electronic entertainment entrepreneurs--ranging from Internet publishers to developers of games and entertainment programming--and provide them with the same collaborative environment and scale economics that Liberty brings to cable programming. The project, Mr. Barton says, is taking extensive time and research.
In the interim, Mr. Barton works in the upper stratosphere of media power, pushing through colossal deals in conventional media as a free agent. The morning of this interview, he was enjoying the high from his role in helping his friend Mr. Diller acquire the TV operations of Universal Studios (a unit of Seagram) and its USA Network.
But Mr. Barton warns that friendship goes only so far when you're closing deals that involve billions of dollars and influence millions of consumers. "You can't count on your partners all the time," he warns. "They're capable of romancing each other while putting together a cabal that will eat their competitors' entrails."
Mr. Barton says that he prefers a less combative style of business--he instinctively heads for the chairlift rather than the boardroom: "You have one commodity in life, and that's your time on this planet. You can choose to piss it all away in a lawyer's office and argue endlessly, or have fun and do business."
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