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To: Sam who wrote (7565)	12/17/1999 10:32:00 AM
From: LK2	Respond to of 9256

*OT*Investing lessons. Time Warner turns $6.25 million into $91 million in two months. Just buy stock in hot IPO before the IPO goes public. Why didn't we think of that? Regards, Larry >>>>>>>> ======== redherring.com Time Warner turns big paper profit on OpenTV investment By Tom Davey Redherring.com December 17, 1999 Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), buoyed by a jackpot it hit with OpenTV (Nasdaq: OPTV), unveiled this week a $500 million investment fund targeting the Internet. The print, film, and broadcast media conglomerate, which owns Time magazine, Cable News Network (CNN), and Warner Brothers, plans to acquire minority stakes in digital media companies over the next few years. Time Warner is flush with capital, at least on paper. In October, the media giant invested $6.25 million in OpenTV at $1.11 per share a month before OpenTV went public. Shares of OpenTV now trade in the $80 range, making Time Warner's two-month-old investment worth a whopping $91 million. It?s not hard to understand why the company wants to spread more bets across a large number of digital media infrastructure properties and Web sites. Time Warner says it'll use the new fund for minority investments of $5 million to $20 million. It also plans to consider both large and small investments. Officials didn't say whether they plan to take active roles, such as board memberships, in companies in which they invest. TIME TO GET STARTED UP Time Warner began dabbling in digital media early this year and since then has invested about $50 million in startup companies such as OpenTV, Replay Networks, Fortune City, Intervu (Nasdaq: ITVU), Healtheon/WebMD (Nasdaq: HLTH), and Bolt. In many ways, Time Warner's digital strategy is typical of a media company. "It looks like the same way media conglomerates have always operated," says David Card, an analyst at Jupiter Communications (Nasdaq: JPTR), noting that such companies tend to make many external investments. Even if most of the investments don?t pan out, he says, "they might learn some stuff by working with weird technology companies." Other media companies that have had similar funds include TCI (now AT&T [NYSE: T] Cable Services), Viacom (NYSE: VIA), and Tribune (NYSE: TRB). "John Malone started with this kind of strategy nearly a decade ago," says Bishop Cheen, an analyst with First Union Securities (NYSE: FTU). "Maybe Time Warner will turn this into a tracking stock." All content copyright ¸ Red Herring Communications. ======== <<<<<<<<