Warner

"Before Warner, virtually everything Ross had done had been a preface; transient; utilitarian. Alliances he had formed had been little but handholds to enable him to climb higher. Now, for the first time, he had appropriated a business that he would not just as happily discard. He would continue to climb—he could not not—but he would never leave its province. He did not need to. It offered him everything he might want: seemingly infinite vistas of business possibility; astronomical compensation; entree to a glamorous, star-studded world. And it was, moreover, a business where his instincts with people—cultivating them, catering to them, winning their favor—would be extraordinarily, even uniquely, useful."

"As word got out I was looking, I got a call from Steve Ross at Warner. He was an impeccably dressed and roguishly charming media visionary charging against the Big Three television networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) that dominated broadcasting with unprecedented news and entertainment choices. Ross had parleyed his early start in the funeral parlor business into what would one day become one of the largest entertainment companies in the world, Time Warner."

"I could see what was coming: once Warner got everyone hooked on free content with MTV, it was going to increase the price down the road. So I needed to throw a monkey wrench into their IPO plans for MTV. So I wrote a letter to Warner that stipulated that, absent a mutually acceptable agreement, we were dropping MTV from all of our systems. I knew this would interrupt the MTV prospectus (the offering document for the IPO), because it would be considered a material change if the largest distributor planned to discontinue carriage. Drew, whom I liked, was on the plane and sitting in my office the next day, and Warner and TCI struck a long-term deal that protected us against the increase in rates. Quality content would become much more valuable. Already cable was outgrowing its amateur-hour status compared with the broadcast networks. CNN was now in 26 million homes, with a George Peabody Award in journalism. HBO would win its first Emmy in 1988 with a documentary."