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Hour dramas face risky economics

Hollywood Reporter - Found 20 hours ago
I once heard media mogul Barry Diller comment that 'most television fails most of the time.' Failure is expensive in primetime, and history...

Posted on March 20, 2010, 5:35 am

Is FiLife Running On Borrowed Time?

paidContent.org - Found Mar. 19, 2010
It survived the multiple trimmings as Barry Diller cut back on IAC?s portfolio of emerging businesses, but the company is now exploring...

Posted on March 19, 2010, 9:57 am

Janice Min Puts Her Soho Loft Up for Sale [Real Estate]

Gawker - Found Mar. 17, 2010
... last summer and may now be planning to launch a "celebrity mom-based website" for media mogul Barry Diller, is looking for a buyer for her...

Posted on March 17, 2010, 9:46 am

Gaikai lines up financing for cloud-based gaming services

VentureBeat - Found Mar. 16, 2010
Gaikai?s first customer is InstantAction , a company owned by Barry Diller?s InterActive Corp., which plans to use Gaikai to make games...

Posted on March 16, 2010, 8:23 am

Game changers by the Bay

Variety - Found Mar. 12, 2010
Steve Perlman said the service will be just "three months late" now.¦ InstantAction, owned by Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp., said it...

Posted on March 12, 2010, 3:35 am

Barry Diller sets his sights on brick-and-mortar video game ...

Los Angeles Times - Found Mar. 11, 2010
Barry Diller has ... InstantAction? Since buying the company in 2007 for tens of millions of dollars, Diller's IAC/InteractiveCorp.
InstantAction to offer embeddable console games - CNET News.com
InstantAction to offer embeddable console games - CNET
Bye-bye, game discs? Barry Diller's InstantAction aims to deliver ... - Los Angeles Times
InstantAction makes big downloadable games instantly available to ... - Industry Standard
Explore All

Posted on March 11, 2010, 10:04 am

Stepping out with Oscar

Variety - Found Mar. 8, 2010
... dinner/viewing party ended, and what might be termed "seasoned veterans" -- Kirk Douglas, Barry Diller, Betsy Bloomingdale, George Hamilton...

Posted on March 8, 2010, 8:15 am

Party Hopping Before the Oscars

Daily Beast - Found Mar. 7, 2010
... moved over to Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg's annual picnic in honor of Vanity Fair's editor-in-chief Graydon Carter. (Barry Diller is...

Posted on March 7, 2010, 9:45 am

Oscar Not-So-Thriller: Diller Mogul Picnic

Deadline Hollywood Daily - Found Mar. 6, 2010
Rather, this was about Barry Diller's Saturday afternoon lawn luncheon. Ostensibly, it's in honor of Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. In...

Posted on March 6, 2010, 6:10 am

GSC: Barry Diller believes people will pay for online content

Seattle Times - Found Feb. 24, 2010
SAN FRANCISCO -- Barry Diller, IAC chief executive, believes people will pay for online content.

Posted on February 24, 2010, 6:15 am

Barry Diller Biography

Barry Diller
extracted from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License

Barry Diller

Diller at the 2009 premiere of the Metropolitan Opera
Born Barry Charles Diller
February 2, 1942 (1942-02-02) (age 68)
San Francisco, California, U.S.
Occupation Media executive
Years active 1964–present
Spouse(s) Diane von Fürstenberg
(2001-present)

Barry Charles Diller1 (born February 2, 1942) is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of IAC/InterActiveCorp and the media executive responsible for the creation of Fox Broadcasting Company and USA Broadcasting.

Contents

Life and career

Early life

Diller was born and raised in San Francisco, California, the son of Reva (née Addison) and Michael Diller.2 He began his career through a family connection3 in the mailroom of the William Morris Agency after dropping out of UCLA after one semester. He was hired by ABC in 1964 and was soon placed in charge of negotiating broadcast rights to feature films. He was promoted to Vice President of Development in 1965. In this position, Diller created the ABC Movie of the Week, pioneering the concept of the made-for-television movie through a regular series of 90-minute films produced exclusively for television.

Career at Paramount

Diller served for ten years as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Paramount Pictures Corporation starting in 1974. With Diller at the helm, the studio produced hit television programs such as Laverne & Shirley (1976), Taxi (1978), and Cheers (1982) and films ranging from Saturday Night Fever (1977), and Grease (1978) to Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and its sequel Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) to Terms of Endearment (1983) and Beverly Hills Cop (1984).

Career at Fox

From October 1984 to April 1992, he held the positions of Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Fox, Inc, parent company of Fox Broadcasting Company and 20th Century Fox, where he greenlighted hits like The Simpsons. Diller quit 20th Century-Fox in 1992 and purchased a $25 million stake in QVC teleshopping network. Diller resigned from QVC in 1995.

USA Broadcasting

In 1997, Diller acquired the assets of Silver King Broadcasting, the collective group of over-the-air TV stations owned by then Bud Paxson's Home Shopping Network as well as the Home Shopping Network itself. Along with this acquisition, Diller also purchased the rights to the USA Network from the Bronfman family. Due to Home Shopping getting more notoriety on the cable networks from his former dealings with the QVC Network, Diller sought to repurpose the broadcast stations into independent, locally-run stations as part of a station group dubbed USA Broadcasting of which the flagship station was WAMI-TV in Miami Beach, FL. The purpose of the network was to have the flagship, WAMI, produce sports and news programming while testing general interest programming for the other stations in the group, of which the general interest programming would be locally produced by the other stations in the group. Due to the high costs involved with producing and acquiring talent for shows outside the typical areas of New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA, plus the significantly low ratings such shows received in Miami Beach, the remaining shows were moved to Los Angeles to regain traction, but never did. Diller eventually sold the TV assets to Univision after rejecting a bid from The Walt Disney Company. The USA Network and its assets were later sold off to Vivendi. Diller retained the assets of the Home Shopping Network and the subsequent Internet assets he acquired later to bolster the HSN Online stable that later became IAC/InterActiveCorp.

2000s

Diller with his wife Diane von Fürstenberg at the 2009 Metropolitan Opera premiere

Diller is currently the Chairman of Expedia and the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of IAC/InterActiveCorp, an interactive commerce conglomerate and the parent of companies including ServiceMagic, Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster, Match.com, Citysearch, LendingTree and Connected Ventures, home of Vimeo and CollegeHumor. In 2005, IAC/InterActiveCorp acquired Ask.com, marking a strategic move into the Internet search category. Diller has been on the board of The Coca-Cola Company since 2002. The new headquarters of IAC/InterActiveCorp was designed by Frank Gehry and opened in 2007 at 18th Street and the West Side Highway in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. The western half of the block is dedicated to the building which stands several stories taller than the massive Chelsea Piers Sporting complex just across the West Side Highway. The extra floors guarantee a panoramic Hudson River view from Diller's sixth-floor office.

Barry Diller, September 2007. Photo by Christopher Peterson.

In 2001, Diller married fashion designer and longtime friend Diane von Fürstenberg, although media reports by Maer Roshan and other reputable journalists have repeatedly stated he is gay.

In 2003, on the PBS TV program NOW with Bill Moyers, Diller vocalized a strong warning against media consolidation. In the interview he referred to media ownership by a few big corporations as an oligarchy, saying the concentration strangles new ideas.4

Barry Diller was "the highest-paid executive [of 2005 fiscal year]" according to a report by The New York Times on Thursday, October 26, 2006 with a total compensation package in excess of $295 million.5 In an opinion article in the New York Times of Nov 7, 2006, Nicholas D. Kristof awarded him his annual Michael Eisner Award, consisting of a $5 shower curtain, for corporate rapacity and laziness.6

"The Killer Dillers"

Diller is responsible for what the media dubs "The Killer Dillers" – people whom Diller mentored and who later became big-time media executives in their own right. Examples include Michael Eisner (who was President & COO of Paramount Pictures while Diller was Chairman & CEO of Paramount Pictures, who went on to become Chairman & CEO of The Walt Disney Company), Dawn Steel (future head of Columbia Pictures and the first woman to run a movie studio, who worked under Diller at Paramount), Jeffrey Katzenberg (head of PDI/DreamWorks Animation, principal of DreamWorks SKG, former head of Walt Disney Studios, and a head of production of Paramount under Diller), Garth Ancier, President of BBC America, and Don Simpson, who was President of Production at Paramount under Diller and Eisner, was also included – he later went on to run a production company based on the Disney lot with Jerry Bruckheimer. Diller also had a well known heated working relationship with the controversial TV executive, Stephen Chao, whom he worked with at Fox Television and later hired as President of Programming and Marketing at USA Network. Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, served as Diller's General Counsel during their tenure at USA Broadcasting, and again as Chief of Business Operations and a member of Barry Diller's Office of the Chairman at IAC/InterActiveCorp.

Personal life

In 2001, he married fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg. He is stepfather to Alexander von Furstenberg and Tatiana von Furstenberg. He is a life-long Democrat and supporter of progressive causes.7

Barry Diller at the Web 2.0 Conference 2005.

Further reading

  • "Diller, Barry". The Museum of Broadcast Communications. Retrieved 14 July 2006.
  • "Why Did Barry Diller Marry? by Nick Denton". Gawker.com. Retrieved 12 May 2009.
  • "'Inside Out: The closet has finally outlived its usefulness. So why do gay celebrities insist on staying in? And why do journalists guard the door?' by Maer Roshan" New York Magazine. Retrieved 12 May 2009.

References