The Billionaire Shell Game : How Cable Baron John Malone and Assorted Corporate Titans Invented a FutureNobody Wanted
Author: L.J. Davis
List Price: $24.95
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ISBN: 0385479271
Publisher: Doubleday (15 September, 1998)
Sales Rank: 57,154
Average Customer Rating: 3.29 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 4 out of 5
Cable Barons
This book is the single best book summarising the history of cable and its influence on our lives.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Good content, jumbled delivery.
I liked the book because I enjoyed reading about the players involved. It would have been a better read had the author not "bounced" around on the time-line so much, & left a few cliche's out.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Inartfully written but fascinating history of cable TV.
It's a history of Malone's cable empire that grew out of TCI, and the early struggle among entertainment, electronics, and telecommunications companies for control of the coaxial pipeline that brought us interactive digital television and the information superhighway's express lane. A blurb on the back cover from Les Brown, founder of Channels magazine, speaks of the author's "explosive wit." I find Davis's writing, in this book at least, annoyingly snide. His bias against Malone drips from the pages.
Nevertheless, he presents a fairly interesting history of the cable industry, providing a backdrop to the high-stakes, seminal deals being done in the media industry now, involving mega-players such as AT&T, Time Warner, Microsoft, MCI, America Online, Comcast, and MediaOne. This is a time of monumental change in the media industry, and it helps to have a sense of the history.
The titans referred to in the tag line, besides Malone, include Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, Gerald Levin, Nicholas Negroponte, Steve Ross, and Nick Nicholas. Oh, and the story prominently features Malone's political nemesis, a former Senator from Tennessee named Gore, who once called Malone the "king of the cable cosa nostra."
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