News Corp. Raises More Funds in Possible Sign of DirecTV Bid

[John Corn]

News Corp. raised about $1.3 billion through a secondary stock offering in its Fox Entertainment Group Inc. (NYSE:FOX - News) unit, signaling that Rupert Murdoch may be laying the groundwork for a second run at satellite broadcaster DirecTV, Wednesday's Wall Street Journal reported.

Fox Entertainment, which is 85.3% owned by News Corp., earlier this year filed a shelf registration to raise $2.5 billion in equity or debt. Fox, which last week reported strong results for the fiscal first quarter ended Sept. 30, encompasses most of News Corp.'s entertainment assets, including the Fox movie studio, Fox TV network, cable channels such as Fox News, and investments in regional cable sports channels and professional sports teams. Mr. Murdoch is chairman and chief executive of News Corp. and Fox Entertainment.

Full Story (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/dowjones/20021113/bs_dowjones/200211130142000136)

[platinum]

Sweet

[t2]

This is encouraging to hear. Right now, the DTV management team is totally incompetent and is running a great service into the ground. Even if he cannot buy DTV entirely he should do the following things to reinstill customer confidence:

1. Buy out and FIRE the entire management team. Replace them w/ people that understand how to run a sattelite tv company.
2. Clean house in every department.
3. Dramatically lower the price of every programming package
to compete w/echostar and cable monopolies like AT&t comcast.
4. Immediatedly add a significant number of international, local and national channels. Fight E for every available channel.
5. Rapidly speed up and improve customer service. It takes entirely too long to talk to someone on the phone.

[raj2001]

Also fire that CSR who had me looking for clouds and airplanes (and UFO's?) in the sky last night to explain why my picture was freezing and pixellating every 10 seconds (that the firmware upgrade fixed anyway).

[normang]

Rubert has other $$ problems that this may wind up resolving, not buying another company and that amount is no where near what would be needed to buy DTV...

[platinum]

Well said t2