TED TURNER’S ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS: AVOID TV

Ted Turner, who pioneered cable television with his WTBS Superstation and later with CNN, has told a conference in Los Angeles that if he were starting out today, he wouldn’t get into television at all but would probably target clean alternative energy. “The television business is filled,” he told the second annual “Produced By” conference hosted by the Producers Guild of America. “When I started 30 years ago, TV was a business of scarcity. There wasn’t enough television. Now television is an overstocked medium. There’s too much television. … You want to be in a new business so you can discover things, and one with a high barrier to entry so that you’ll have limited competition for as long as possible.” (At the same conference, Mark Cuban, who made his fortune on the Internet, suggested that he sees little opportunity there these days. “If you look where everybody else is looking, that’s the wrong place. Everybody’s looking at the Internet. It’s done!” he said.)