The unstoppable and breakneck coming together of computer technology, telecommunications and cable and satellite television is turning the industries likely to be affected upside down, and several companies are suddenly being viewed with new – and hungry – eyes. With a threatened explosion of new entertainment channels and media, anyone with a big back catalogue of movies and television suddenly has a priceless asset, and the purchases by Sony Corp of CBS Records and Columbia Films, and by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co of MCA Inc all at once look like extraordinarily prescient moves. At all events, the prices paid look much less outrageous, witness the fact that the current deal under which cable television operator Viacom Inc proposes to acquire Paramount Inc will almost certainly not be the final deal under which Paramount loses its independence. A pack of competitors is weighing up alternate bids for Paramount and its movie and television facilities and back catalogue, and QVC Network Inc, another cable television firm, has received a commitment from Comcast Corp and Liberty Media Corp, its controlling shareholders, to support a counter-bid for Paramount. Comcast and Liberty have agreed to invest $1,000m in QVC to help finance a bid, the Wall Street Journal reported.

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It also suggested that Ted Turner, of Cable News Network fame, and his Turner Broadcasting System Inc approached QVC over the weekend about making a joint bid to acquire Paramount. The New York Times reported in its Saturday edition that Merrill Lynch and Co was advising Turner Broadcasting on a possible bid, and that Blockbuster Entertainment Corp, owner of a chain of video stores and a partner of IBM Corp on a music-on-demand system, was considering making an offer. Speculation about new bids pushed Paramount’s stock up $3.50 per share on Friday to an all-time high of $68.50, but the speculation has put pressure on Viacom’s shares in the other direction, so that its share exchange offer is now only worth about $63, making it clear that the market believes that whoever wins Paramount will have to pay a lot more than Viacom’s initial bid. A QVC offer, which is expected to exceed $70 a share in stock and cash, or more than $8,000m could come this week, people involved in the plan told the Wall Street Journal. Others thought to be weighing up a bid include the German publishing and music empire Bertelsmann AG, while Cox Enterprises Inc, owner of the sixth-largest US cable system, is also said to be sizing up a way to participate in the Paramount bidding. Time Warner Inc, which owns 19% of Turner Broadcasting, is said to support Ted Turner’s plan to explore a bid for Paramount. Time Warner also has a 9% stake in QVC, but has considerably less influence there since QVC is controlled by Comcast, Liberty and its chairman. Paramount and Viacom have provisions in their agreement to discourage another bid, and both have said that they aren’t worried about a rival bid from the QVC group, but the Viacom offer for Paramount contains no price protection for shareholders in the event of a decline in Viacom. On the industrial logic side, the Paramount and Viacom camps maintain QVC’s television home shopping network can’t offer Paramount the same synergistic merger of assets as Viacom’s extensive holdings in cable programming.