Endemol matters to the Australian sector because it is a large international player, and it just happens to own Southern Star. After a horrible few years, Endemol has worked its way through the initial crisis, and may be emerging as a larger player, even though it thinks of itself as the top predator already.
By the turn of the century, Endemol rode high enough with its Big Brother franchise to become the largest format player in the world. Joop ven den Ende and John de Mol sold it to Telefonica, the Spanish media company in 2000, which took a quarter of it public. By 2007, the whole company had been bought and taken off the stock exchange by a consortium called Edam Acquisition, created by John de Mol. It mostly consisted of Mediaset, the Berlusconi family company, and de Mol’s own Cyrte, along with Goldman Sachs.
