Barry Diller

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Barry Diller, September 2007. Photo by Christopher Peterson.

Barry Diller is a media executive responsible for the creation of Fox Broadcasting Company and USA Broadcasting.

[edit] Biography

Barry Diller was born February 2, 1942 in Beverly Hills, California, where he was raised and began his career through a family connection^[1] in the mailroom of the William Morris Agency after dropping out of UCLA after one semester. In 2001 he married fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg.

Barry Diller at the Web 2.0 Conference 2005.

[edit] Career at ABC

He was hired by ABC in 1966 and was soon placed in charge of negotiating broadcast rights to feature films. He was promoted to vice president in charge of feature films and program development in 1969. 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.

[edit] 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).

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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 notarity 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 siginicantly 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.

[edit] 2000s

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 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, an epicenter of the city's gay community. 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 top-floor office.

In 2001, Diller married fashion designer and longtime friend Diane von Fürstenberg.

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.^[2]

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.^[3] 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.^[4]

[edit] "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.

[edit] Trivia

Barry Diller is the owner of the sailing yacht EOS; at 93 metres it is the largest sailing yacht in the world. .

[edit] References

Eos is the SECOND largest privately owned sailing yacht in the world after Tom Perkins' Maltese Falcon. The 93m figure you are quoting includes the bowsprit (a spar extending from the bow of the vessel, which is not generally included in an overall length (LOA) figure. The length of Eos excluding the bowsprit is actually 82.60m

[edit] Resources

• "Diller, Barry". The Museum of Broadcast Communications. Retrieved 14th July, 2006.