It's Official: News Corp to Buy DirecTV

Guppy06 writes "According to this Washington Post article, the heads at both News Corporation (owners of Fox) and DirecTV have agreed to a $6.6 billion deal to secure the purchase of DirecTV by News, with GM getting a little less than half of that total in cash. All that remains now is the actual exchange. For the record, EchoStar was going to pay $30 billion before the FCC shot them down."

This is great news

[Anonymous Coward]

Direc TV has always been a potentially great service but it has been consistently held back by lack of investment and poor marketing. Hopefully the Murdock millions will allow it to become truelly viable to the large number of Americans who just want to watch TV as easily and painlessly as possible.
WHat I want is a PVR that will allow me to pause live TV, have digital and analogue recording to a massive hard drive and to record programs that I might want to watch as easily as possible. Throw in the ability to play OGG/WMA and I'd be a happy man.

For us non-usians

[rf0]

Could someone explain which coporations on what? Here in the UK its basically the BBC + Sky but not sure about any other major players

Rus

Moving towards a unbalanced view of the news...?

[I-Rev]

Does this mean that there is less choice in the US over who supplies the news? If it is, it's got to be a bad thing.

You only have to look at the past few months, with camera men being sacked for editing photos for publication in major news papers, and footage of the Iraqi war to show that news groups need to be more honest - and have competition to measure their views.

Views on the push by the US forces ranged from "Hurrah, the people are free", to "Look how the Americans allow people to loot" - with all the channels showing the same footage. One side said it was the whole city rising up, with another saying only a few hundred were celebrating.

So far this morning, the BBC have said both!

I find modern news channels being more political than ever before, and views on the same thing seem to contradict each other.

It all makes it harder to find out the real facts - especially if a company wants to be classed as friends of a political group to get more information - would they really state the facts if it was going to hurt a 'friendly' political group?

Ian.

Has people stopped watching TV yet?

[lingqi]

A lot of posts has been about "we well all be brainwashed" etc. But really - I stopped watching TV a long time ago, and never missed it.

I do, however, miss DirectTV DSL, which used to be Telocity, the ONLY nationwide provider that does static IP for 50 bux a month, and don't mind if you run servers, NAT, whatever.

Why did they go under, anyhow... sigh. SBC is just not the same... not the same....

Re:What liberal media?

[Flounder]

1) Since when has CNN, NBC, etc had a strong conservative bias?? Obviously, I'm watching the wrong channel. When 90% of journalists working for a 24 cable news channel voted liberal in the previous 3 elections, that has a tendency to skew the reporting of that particular channel.

2) Notice that Clinton was never criticized on TV for the things that actually mattered. Campaign donations from foreign countries is the kind of thing that causes presidents to get impeached (and they actually get kicked out). CNN was more interested in cigars and stained dresses.

3) And if you consider PBS to be unbiased, what exactly do you call liberal?

Re:Originally, Murdoch offered more $$$

[sheldon]

EchoStar offered $30 billion to buy Hughes Electronics.

Murdoch also offered to buy Hughes Electronics.

This deal isn't about Hughes Electronics, rather he has now offered $6 billion to buy Hughes Electronics 20% interest in DirecTV.

"Now Murdoch gets Directv at a much better rate."

But he doesn't get Hughes Electronics. Hughes is the GM satellite services group... they launch all sorts of commercial broadcast satellites. DirecTV was part of that, but so is XM radio and Onstar system and a whole slew of other things.