My previous post was meant to be the introduction to this book review. It detailed how I first got interested in television and broadcasting. I was a small cog at a one-camera, small-market, television station in North Dakota. John Malone is a giant in the global television and broadcasting industry.
So, picking up from where I left off, herein is a review of John Malone’s recently published book, Born to Be Wired: Lessons from a Lifetime Transforming Television, Wiring America for the Internet, and Growing Formula One, Discovery, SiriusXM, and the Atlanta Braves (copyright September 2025 by Simon & Schuster).
The book, at 423 pages, is as long as the book’s subtitle but it never bogs down. It just keeps on rolling through the various ages of television:
- from on air to coaxial cable to fiber optics to satellites;
- from analog-TV to HDTV;
- from ABC/CBS/NBC to HBO/Showtime;
- from Netflix to the current “streaming” explosion; and
- from Ted Turner to Rupert Murdoch to Reed Hastings (Netflix) to Barry Diller.
John Malone was a merit scholar at Yale University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and economics (1963). Soon after he received a master’s degree in industrial management and a PhD in operations research from John Hopkins University.
After graduating from John Hopkins, Malone worked at AT&T’s Bell Labortories. He determined, after a presentation to the AT&T board of directors (at age 27), that his entrepreneurial personality did not align with Ma Bell’s culture. He quickly moved on to McKinsey & Company. After assessing the situation, as a consultant, at Jerrold Electronics, he accepted the position of CEO at that firm, which was then the dominant supplier and financier of the cable industry.
[As an aside, I also worked for AT&T, where my stodgy and risk-adverse personality apparently aligned with Ma Bell’s conservative culture. I stayed with AT&T until they no longer wanted me – until they spun me off to Lucent Technologies, who, in turn, spun me off to Avaya.]
Per Malone, “In the late 1940’s, a few inventive entrepreneurs had discovered they could deliver better TV reception to whole communities by essentially sticking the equivalent of a big roof antenna atop a hill, wiring the signal down to individual homes, and charging them a monthly fee for the service.” This idea slowly took off, being especially popular where hills and buildings negatively impacted the “line of sight” between TV station towers and the viewers’ receivers.
In 1973 Malone became the CEO of Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI). Under Malone’s leadership, TCI grew through strategic acquisitions and financial discipline until it became the largest cable operator in the United States. In 1991, TCI spun off Liberty Media, which expanded into media, sports and entertainment. Malone remained with TCI until 1999, when it was acquired by AT&T. Chapters 5-19 go into detail on this part of Malone’s career.
Chapter 7 (Media Maverick) relates how Ted Turner tried to convince TCI to carry his TBS satellite network. It is a funny story.
Chapter 9 (Crazy Like a Fox) gets into Malone’s lifelong relationship with Rupert Murdoch.
Chapter 10 (Sweet Liberty) describes why and how Liberty Media was spun off.
Chapter 11 (Compression Obsession) describes how the development of high-definition television (HDTV) revolutionized both television and the cable industry (more channels, sharper resolution, and prettier pictures).
Chapter 12 (Telephone Tag) introduces DirecTV, Dish Network, and the seven regional “Baby Bells.” Southwestern Bell was the first of the regional Bell companies to buy a cable company in the United States.
Chapter 13 (Failure to Launch) talks about the aborted merger of TCI and Bell Atlantic.
Chapter 14 (Pipe Dreams) adds the likes of America Online, CompuServe, Netscape, the power of cable modems, and @Home (an AOL killer) to the story. At that time, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) was starting to blur the lines between the phone companies and the cable-TV providers.
Chapter 16 (Turner’s Last Stand) talks about the combination of Warner Brothers, Time’s magazines, and HBO with Ted Turner’s networks (CNN, TBS and TNT), and the subsequent creation of AOL Time Warner (the biggest mistake in the history of business, per some).
Chapters 20 (Last Ride) and 21 (Disconnected) were the saddest chapters in the book (for me). Chapter 20 chronicles how Malone convinced AT&T to buy TCI, making Malone the largest individual shareholder in AT&T.
Chapter 21 details the chaos that occurred when AT&T launched a surprise $62 billion bid for MediaOne (with $20 billion of it in cash) – a foolish transaction for a company in danger of running out of cash – a company then depending on commercial paper to exist. Eventually, AT&T backtracked and spun off Malone’s “baby” (Liberty Media). AT&T continued on its path of destruction with poor strategies, bad timing, and worse execution.
Towards the end of Chapter 21, Malone remined me that, “… in January 2004, AT&T agreed to sell itself for all of $16 billion to the former Southwestern Bell, later SBC Communications, which AT&T had spun off in 1984. The company that bears the AT&T brand now was really one of Ma Bell’s seven progeny.” Malone continued, “I have made many mistakes in business and life, and selling TCI to AT&T might have been the biggest whopper of them all.”
Chapter 22 (Going Global) tells that story.
Chapter 23 (Clearing the Ledger) details how Malone swapped its shares in News Corp (Murdoch) for News Corps’ shares of DirectTV, a deal that worked out well for both companies (per Malone).
Chapter 24 (Owner’s Manual) introduced me to Barry Diller, a “Hollywood wunderkind” who built Fox Broadcasting. Malone writes that, “Barry Diller was one of the best in my long career in doing deals and building businesses.” In the chapter Malone notes some of Diller’s businesses and E-commerce platforms (e.g., Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster, Hotels.com, Match.com).
Chapter 25 (The Great Karmazin) details Malone’s control of SiriusXM and Pandora Media. His initial investment of $12,500 grew to upwards of $5 billion.
Chapter 26 (Chartering a Comeback) begins by telling how Malone (Liberty Media) got back into the United States cable TV business by purchasing a stake in Charter Communication, which in turn grew to be the largest cable operator in America with the purchases of Time Warner Cable, BrightHouse, and Cox Communications. Malone noted that, “The Charter corporate name will eventually shift to Cox Communications, but for customers, Spectrum remains the brand they know.”
Chapter 26 then moved on to the more depressing side of the cable-TV industry, discussing the intensified competition in the broadband market with the likes of wireless carriers like Verizon and T-Mobile, the big content companies like Viacom and Disney (ESPN), and the advent of “streaming.” The industry and populace began to talk about “cord-cutting.”
Malone noted: “Traditional pay-TV peaked at 99 million in 2011, and by 2023, the total was down to 52 million. Devastating disruption, really.” Malone further notes that some cable operators “simply pass rising programming costs on to the customers with little effort to retain them.” He further noted that some believe that cable operators are becoming just “dumb pipes.” The fifty-year-old cable-TV industry was starting to fade as the likes of Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix (that used the pipes created by and maintained by the cable industry) grew brighter.
Chapter 27 (Streaming Dreams) tells the amazing story of Reed Hasting’s Netflix, and how the cable operators (via their “dumb pipes”) and the content providers (via their licensing terms) helped Netflix to grow until it had the cash flow to create its own vast reservoir of content and dominant industry position. This chapter also gets into the legal concept of “net neutrality” and the financial benefits of this concept to FAANG – Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google (YouTube).
Chapter 28 (Formula One) addresses Malone’s financial interest in Formula One racing. It also gets into Malone’s use of tracking stocks.
Chapter 29 (Taming Big Tech) outlines some of Malone’s ideas to rein in and monitor the gigantic FAANG companies, including antitrust lawsuits, investigations into the companies’ algorithms (that moderate content and recommend ads), ad auctions, and their third-party alliances.
Chapter 30 (Latest Discovery) discusses Warner Bros. Discovery’s plan to split (in 2026) into two public companies, one focused on streaming and studios, the other on the legacy cable networks. The large looming question, per Malone, is whether either of these new companies can “produce enough standout content to sustain a global streaming empire?”
Chapter 31 (CNN: Hard News) was brief and one of my favorites. Malone suggests that the media has – “if not an obligation, then a moral imperative – to help unite the country, rather than endlessly exposing and exacerbating our differences.” He also suggests that news organizations “put the news in deeper context,” show the numbers, and tell us what they mean.
Chapter 34 (Adapt or Die) recaps some of the factors that the cable companies and their customers are facing today. He notes that one of the “biggest flaws in the cable-TV package” is the “skyrocketing price of live sports.” Malone also wrote about: the competition for “content” (peaking in 2022 at 1543 new scripted and unscripted shows and movies), and Big Techs recent interest in sports (96% of the top broadcasts in 2023 were live sports). When Big Tech gets interested, the bidding goes up, cable fees increase, and the broadband infrastructure gets strained.
Malone ends Chapter 34, the last chapter in the book, by noting, “Technology will continue to shape the viewer experience. Cable operators were disrupted by streaming, but content creators will face similar disruption from AI. … The companies that stay sharp, anticipate change, and adapt will survive – because media, at its core, is a living organism. It evolves or it dies.”
Bismarck-Mandan Cable TV
In my previous post – the introduction to this book review – I described my brief career in the broadcasting industry with Meyer Broadcasting Company. At about the time I was leaving Meyer (1969) or shortly thereafter, Meyer got into the cable-TV game by founding Bismarck-Mandan Cable TV. As I recall, its main office was on the first floor of the building that KFYR broadcast from – possibly the former flower shop.
“Head end” is the term used within the industry to describe where all the antennas, satellite dishes, and other receiving equipment are located. At first, Bismarck-Mandan Cable TV had its head end on a hill to the east of Bismarck. At that location, which I only saw once, they had an antenna that looked a bit different than the “big roof antenna atop a hill” that Malone had described in his book.
It was a large reflector, about the size of a basketball court (as I recall), which was constructed by stretching many wires over many parabolic shaped supports to form a toroidal surface. Receiving antennas (i.e., big roof antennas) were positioned at the locus of foci. The reflector was aimed at an ABC station in eastern North Dakota. Bismarck Mandan Cable TV customers, for a fee, could thus watch all three of the TV networks, whereas the regular nonpaying folk only got the two “free” stations, KFYR/NBC and KXMB/CBS. That was the start of the cable-TV business in Bismarck. HBO and ESPN would follow.
Malone in his book wrote about how the mom-and-pop cable-TV providers were gobbled up by the likes of his TCI. In the case of Bismarck-Mandan Cable TV, it was acquired by Dakota Cable/Meredith Cable in 1991. That company was later acquired, in 1995, by the current owner, Midcontinent Communications (Midco), a regional cable provider. Per Malone’s book, Barry Diller (IAC) owns some of the Meredith magazine and non-broadcast assets. The broadcast industry is a bit like a revolving door.
How Much – To Who?
Financially, who are the winners and losers in the ongoing TV, cable, and streaming wars? As I see it, after reading Malone’s book:
The big winners include Netflix (the leader of the streamers, with a big head start, and a lot of “content”); Big Tech and Amazon (because they are still big); and the owners, coaches, and athletes associated with almost every college or professional sports team.
The losers include the cable-TV providers who are losing market share, while investing in and maintaining the broadband infrastructure that the winners (see above) are using. The stock market seems to think that the legacy content providers and the new streamers (not Netflix and Big Tech) are also losers (at least for now).
The biggest losers (me as an example) seem to be the consumers. My cable bill has gone up – as ESPN fees have gone up. My cable provider (Cox) does not seem to care whether I drop their service; they know my options are messy and limited. And now, I find myself having to do business with a variety of new streamers (e.g., ESPN+, Peacock) and Big Tech (e.g., Amazon Prime, Apple TV).
A year ago, I could watch almost every Creighton men’s basketball game on my cable (Fox, FS1, or FS2). This year those games are sprinkled among the Fox outlets noted above, but also with games on ESPN+ (subscription required), Peacock (subscription required), and truTv/TNT (via my cable). On the football side, I can add Amazon Prime (subscription required) and Apple TV (subscription required) to the equation.
Little did I think that a few inventive entrepreneurs, in the 1949s, placing big antennas atop hills, would lead to ESPN, rich sports’ team owners, and the NIL/Portal conditions that are ruining the college sports that I love – the sports that I am now paying more to watch.
My question today remains, “How much and to who”? I don’t have a good answer yet, but I am becoming increasingly frustrated by the direction things are going.