In February 2011, Harry Sloan and Jeff Sagansky founded Global Eagle, a new $190 million fund to acquire media and entertainment ventures. In their first in-depth interview since creating the company, they sat down with TheWrap’s Editor-in-Chief Sharon Waxman to discuss the state of the industry on the eve of the second annual Grill media leadership conference.
Sloan gave the keynote at the conference opening, along with Terry Semel, CEO of Windsor Media.
Sloan was most recently the CEO and chairman of MGM, and previously built SBS Broadcasting into the second largest broadcaster in Europe. Sagansky’s broad experience in television and film includes a stint as president of CBS Entertainment and as a senior executive at Sony over many years.
Sloan and Semel will speak on "Hollywood's Future: Between Wall Street and Silicon Valley" at the SLS Hotel on Monday evening.
The two of you are people everybody in the industry knows. When I was looking back at the announcement of Global Eagle, it said you were looking for high growth media companies. So I put it to you, what the hell is that today?
SLOAN: It’s either a traditional media company outside the United States in a big high growth market, or a new media business in the U.S.
SAGANSKY: There are a number of countries that are anywhere from five to eight years behind the U.S. in terms of broadband penetration, but the underlying economies -- in Asia and Latin America -- are growing double digits. So you’ve got a lot of traditional publishers and broadcasters growing in double digits.
(Get more information on TheGrill here.)
So you’re going to invest outside of the country in traditional media companies, even if 10 years out those are all likely to move to new media?
SLOAN: We’ve seen the future ... it’s happening right here. And it’s predictable. When I was doing broadcasting in Europe, I remember one of the legendary German broadcasters saying, “Germany’s future is America’s present,” and it really was that with the penetration of television. That’s what that SBS story really was for me ... knowing where broadcasting was headed because I’ve seen that in the ‘80s and ‘90s in the U.S. and the early part of this decade in Europe.
It doesn’t concern you -- to be investing in newspapers, if we know where the newspaper story ends … and it’s probably not great?
SAGANSKY: Newspapers aren’t on our list. But there’s other print that might be.
Why aren’t newspapers on your list? That’s a stupid question, but I will ask it.
SLOAN: Well, neither of us have any experience in that business, just to start with. That’s a bit of a cop-out because I know that’s not what you’re asking us, but it would be good to be involved in something that we know something about.
