Comprehensive information and links about Barry Diller

Barry Diller (born February 2, 1942 in San Francisco, CaliforniaBarry Diller is a media executive responsible for the creation of Fox Broadcasting Company.

Biography

Barry Diller was raised in Beverly Hills and began his career in the mailroom of the William Morris Agency, after dropping out of UCLA after one semester. He was hired by ABC in 1966 and was soon placed in charge of negotiating broadcast rights to feature films. He was promoted to vice president in charge of feature films and program development in 1969. In this position, Diller created the , pioneering the concept of the made-for-television movie through a regular series of 90-minute films produced exclusively for television.

Diller served for ten years as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Paramount Pictures Corporation starting in 1972. With Diller at the helm, the studio produced hit television programs such as (1984).

From October 1984 to April 1992, he held the positions of Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Fox, Inc, parent company of Fox Broadcasting Company and 20th Century Fox. Diller quit 20th Century-Fox in 1992 and purchased a $25 million stake in QVC teleshopping network. Diller resigned from QVC in 1995.

Diller is currently the Chairman of Expedia and the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of IACInterActiveCorp, an interactive commerce conglomerate and the parent of companies including Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster, Match.com and Citysearch. In 2005, IACInterActiveCorp acquired Ask Jeeves, marking a strategic move into the Internet search category. Diller has been on the board of The Coca-Cola Company since 2002. The new headquarters of IACInterActiveCorp was designed by Frank Gehry and is scheduled to open summer 2006 at 18th Street and the West Side Highway in Manhattan's fashionable Chelsea neighborhood. The western half of the block is dedicated to the building which stands several stories taller than the massive Chelsea Piers Sporting comlex just across the West Side Highway. The extra floors guarantee a panormic Hudson River view from Diller's top-floor office.

In 2001, Diller married fashion designer and longtime friend Diane von Furstenberg.

Diller is responsible for what the media dubs "The Killer Dillers" -- people who Diller mentored and who later became big-time media executives in their own right. Examples include Michael Eisner (who was President CEO of The Walt Disney Company), Dawn Steel (future head of Columbia Pictures and the first woman to run a movie studio, who worked under Diller at Paramount), and Jeffrey Katzenberg (head of PDIDreamWorks Animation, principal of DreamWorks SKG, former head of Walt Disney Studios, and a head of production of Paramount under Diller).