John Malone is one of cable's fabled cowboys. He is an entrepreneur, visionary and deal-maker and the man who built up a cable company called Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI) into the largest system operator in the business. He also was one the Board of Directors of a company I built that was in the business at the time. My experience was that Mr. Malone was always a master strategist and often ahead of others by many years.

So, what did John Malone do with TCI? He sold it out to AT&T which eventually was absorbed by Comcast. Ever since then, he used that knowledge and experience to go up against his former colleagues. Now, his Liberty Media Group is about to gobble up News Corp.'s 39% stake in DirecTV, the nation's largest satellite TV provider.

According to Multichannel News, Malone is likely to use DirecTV to maintain and expand carriage for his programming, which includes pieces of Discovery Holdings, QVC, Starz and GSN. With that new clout with distributors, he may even buy or launch more networks. The "technically astute" Malone may also help DirecTV figure out how to use broadband access to the Internet to compete with cable companies that offer telephone services and on-demand programming.

His task is to help DirecTV compete with cable's triple play of video, voice and Internet services; and get a leg up in the nascent competition for high-definition TV viewers.

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