MEDIA
Diller makes rebound
Barry Diller, the billionaire chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp, said he regrets buying Newsweek magazine, which he merged with the Daily Beast website in 2010.
“I wish I hadn’t bought Newsweek,” Diller, 71, said. “It was a mistake.”
Diller combined his news website, the Daily Beast, with the 80-year-old newsweekly after an agreement with the late Sidney Harman in November 2010. It’s difficult to publish a weekly magazine when news has become instantaneous, he said.
“It’s a fool’s errand,” Diller said.
Newsweek published its final print issue in December and became a digital-only publication. Diller in recent months has been promoting Aereo Inc., the Internet TV startup he backs that has been battling television networks in court. Aereo can attract 10 million to 20 million subscribers once it is widely marketed, he said.
The service will upend the cable-television business model, he said.
Aereo picks up over-the-air broadcast signals and transmits them via the Internet to subscribers paying $8 a month. So far the company has defeated court efforts to halt the service, has expanded from New York to Boston and will be in 22 cities by the end of the year, Diller said.
transportation
Natural gas promoted
Energy policy makers should offer incentives to convert trucks to run on natural gas to promote energy independence, billionaire T. Boone Pickens said. The U.S. has a larger amount of potential energy in natural gas under its soil than Saudi Arabia’s stated oil reserves, according to Pickens, chairman of BP Capital LLC, a Dallas-based energy trading partnership. Gas is currently selling at about one-fourth the cost of oil when measured by British thermal units of energy.
At $90.97 a barrel, oil costs about $15.63 per million British thermal units compared with $4.33 for natural gas, according to Bloomberg research.
— Bloomberg News
