Nate

"‘I think Nate would rather have had Craig back out of the whole thing and let Nate and Time Warner, and to a lesser extent TCI, take over, really,’ Downey says. ‘Nate tended to keep Craig out of the loop and Nate saw his reporting line as back to Jeff Schwall in the US, who was the Time Warner director to whom Nate reported. That was okay to a point because Time Warner was a huge influence on the HK Partnership. But it did mean that Craig felt not consulted when he should have been and when he saw himself—because of him and Terry having founded the whole operation—as having special rights. That led to persistent misunderstandings and conflicts between Craig and Nate. Both sides were in the wrong. Craig did poke into matters that a chief executive should have handled without difficulty, and Nate did withhold information from directors, including Craig, where he should have consulted us instead of consulting Jeff Schwall.’"

"It was at that point, Smith said, that it became clear to Sky that TVNZ ‘was going to continue to act in an uncompromising manner when it came to joint purchasing of compelling product’. That was when Sky decided to bid alone for the South African tour and sent a fax to TVNZ to say so. On learning of Sky’s determination to bid, Harman rang Fellet. Fellet afterwards made a file note of the call. In it, he recorded that Harman had said that TVNZ had been told its bid for the South African tour was not the highest, so TVNZ presumed that Sky’s was higher.[8](private://read/01jectdbce729daxqkxt7cbe8r/#mn31) ‘I told him that was probably a good assumption,’ Fellet wrote. ‘He said, “It is crazy that we should be bidding against each other for programming.” I told him I couldn’t agree with him more but Sky could not survive being a replay service of the highlights of TVNZ. He said, “We [TVNZ] put in a good bid and I can sleep at night knowing it was a fair bid. I hope you [Sky] are prepared to take the political implications that this move will generate. Your bid will cause Members of Parliament to discuss for the first time legislation to prevent siphoning of programming from broadcast [free-to-air] to pay TV…” I thanked him for his insight and told him that he and Nate both agreed on what type of programming was important for Sky, yet somehow it never seems to translate to any positive action by TVNZ.’"