Rupert Murdoch cleaned up after ITV Digital went into administration and, aided and abetted by the failure of cable to offer any serious alternative, Sky's dominance of digital pay TV is virtually unchallenged.
Also orchestrated an unlikely truce with archrival Leo Kirch (see) last year to create a digital pay TV station.
There's a lot at stake: The number of digital pay TV subscribers is expected to grow between 15% and 30% a year for the next four years, from an estimated 58 million now.
And ITV Digital, their jointly owned and loss-making digital pay-TV operation, is draining money by the day.
A day later he called in for detailed antitrust scrutiny a plan by Kirch and Bertelsmann, two big German media firms, to set up a digital pay-TV venture with Deutsche Telekom.
Liberty did not say why it was backing away from a stake in Premiere, the Kirch Group's digital pay-TV service, but the decision is part of Mr. Malone's maneuvering for a commanding position in the German cable TV industry.
The companies had wanted to create a new digital pay-TV venture by merging Premiere, a pay-TV operation jointly controlled by Kirch and CLT-Ufa, a Luxembourg-based firm 49%-owned by Bertelsmann, with Kirch's own DF-1 pay-TV channel.
But BSkyB will supply BDB with the bulk of its content.After a long battle for control of Germany's digital pay-TV market, Kirch and a Bertelsmann unit, CLT-Ufa, agreed to build a digital TV service jointly around Premiere, Germany's main pay-TV channel.
Quiero, a Spanish digital pay-TV broadcaster that allows viewers to surf the net on the TV while still watching a show in a small box on the screen, was recently put up for sale after failing to sign up enough customers.
In the digital age, it is intolerable that - thanks to the iniquitous listed events rules - one broadcaster can bottle up all the material when it is technically and commercially possible for several digital pay-TV channels to offer parallel live coverage of many events, without undermining the coverage from a national free-to-air broadcaster.
Prior to joining JVP, Gadi was Corporate VP of Product Marketing and a member of the executive committee for NDS (acquired by Cisco for $5bn), a leader in digital pay-TV systems, supporting some of the largest digital broadcast platforms such as DIRECTV, BSkyB, Canal Digital and more.
