ENDING bizarre battle about German women channel TM3 and its most valuable asset, the Champions League rights, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has bought fellow shareholder Herbert Kloiber’s 34 per cent in the loss-making niche broadcaster for a stunning DM350 million. This move, officially announced last week, enables the US-Australian media entrepreneur to proceed with his original plan that was agreed with RTL’s main shareholder CLT-UFA back in December to hand the free-to-air rights of the Champions League to RTL, where they were before TM3’s surprise deal, while Premiere World in which Murdoch through BSkyB recently bought 24 per cent will get the pay-TV rights.

Kloiber had publicly insisted on several occasions for the past months that he will not sell his TM3 stake – no matter how much Murdoch is prepared to pay. Instead he would try to take over Murdoch’s 66 per cent stake himself together with partners, rumoured to be UPC and Kinowelt. However, comments made by the Austrian-born managing director of Munich- based rights trading company Tele Munchen Gruppe in the press release that announces his retreat confirm that, as expected by industry observers (see our sister publication Cable Europe Vol 5 No 8) this was just a negotiating ploy. “The value of our participation in TM3 is now worth ten times as much as 18 months ago,” Kloiber is cited. Murdoch is believed to turn TM3 into a fitness and health network, comparable with his existing US-based service The Health Network while Kloiber will invest the money generated by his TM3 sale into the German pay-TV market. A first deal with cable operator PrimaCom was recently signed under which Tele Munchen povides the Mainz-based company’s digital pay-TV package, due to launch in May, with movies and series and, possibly, themed pay-TV channels.