Talks Could Restructure TV Industry : Communications: Major competitors are discussing new alliances that may change the face of the business.

Some of the leading companies in the television industry--among them Tele-Communications Inc., Time Warner Inc., Paramount Communications and Turner Broadcasting Systems--are engaged in a complex series of overlapping discussions whose outcome could reshape the communications business.

The talks, which involve reconfiguring assets and teaming sometime-competitors in new alliances, are part of a strategic scramble for competitive advantages in the coming era of 500-channel programming options.

Among the odd couples courting each other are these:

* US West and AT&T; are talking with Time Warner about investing in the entertainment giant. Indeed, telephone companies--eager to deliver an array of video, data and information services into the home--are exploring deals with a wide array of partners.

* TCI and Time Warner are talking about dividing up the assets of Turner Broadcasting, in which they are the controlling shareholders. As first reported Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal, the plan would settle the issue of long-term control of TBS, keeping the company in cable industry hands.

* Paramount Communications Inc., the parent company of Paramount Pictures, also has held merger discussions with Turner. A major producer of movies and TV shows--and a book publisher through its Simon & Shuster subsidiary--Paramount wants to link up with a cable TV company that can help distribute its huge library of film and TV programming.

* Capital Cities/ABC Inc., which owns the ABC Television Network, has also held recent discussions with Turner about various business combinations, including the possibility of bidding jointly for the TV rights to the upcoming 1994 Olympics in Atlanta.

Driving these discussions are not only internal management and financial issues--for instance, speculation that media magnate Ted Turner may have decided to cash out of his company--but also cataclysmic changes underway in the television industry.

With the old TV networks in decline, media companies are jostling to create new entities that can produce and package TV programming and deliver it into Americans’ homes via new technologies.

Industry analysts ascribe broad significance to talks such as those between TCI, Time Warner and TBS.

“It would be an incredible deal if they can put it together,” said Richard J. MacDonald, an analyst with Wasserstein Perella in New York.

“Turner should not just be seen as cable networks any longer. These are exploitable, global TV programming franchises,” he said.

In the current talks, each of the companies involved brings certain strengths to the table.

Cable operators such as TCI, with more than 10 million subscribers, are the electronic gateway into the home.

Time Warner, with about 7 million cable subscribers itself, is the largest supplier of entertainment TV programming in the world.

Baby Bells such as Denver-based US West, in addition to their telephone customer base, are working on technologies that can store and retrieve vast amounts of digitalized video programming.

And Turner Broadcasting’s cable networks--CNN, Headline News, TBS, and the TNT and Cartoon networks--not only are among America’s most popular, but they are poised for huge growth in global markets, where satellites and cable TV are just beginning to be introduced.

It is unclear exactly how TCI and Time Warner would divvy up Turner’s assets, should such a deal actually occur.

Time Warner has a first right of refusal to buy CNN and Headline News--an option that goes back to 1987, when Time Warner, TCI and other cable operators bailed Turner out of a financial crisis.

If Time Warner exercised that right, it likely would leave Turner’s three entertainment networks--TBS, TNT and Cartoon Network--in the hands of TCI.

The Denver-based firm already is a major force in cable TV programming. TCI Chief Executive John C. Malone is the controlling shareholder of Liberty Media Corp., which owns stakes of varying sizes in 12 national cable networks, including Court TV, Encore, Family Channel, Black Entertainment Television and the shopping channels Home Shopping Network and QVC.

Who would get Turner’s other assets, such as cartoon factory Hanna-Barbera Productions, is also not known.

But the biggest question is how much consolidation of power regulators will allow in the cable TV industry.

Collectively, TCI and Time Warner already control more than one-third of all cable TV subscribers in the United States.

Together, their revenue exceeds those of ABC, CBS and NBC combined.

Indeed, TCI--its tentacles reaching into almost every corner of the cable business--is the object of concern among some policy-makers in Washington that too much power may be concentrated in too few hands.

But the regulators’ anxiety extends beyond one or even a few firms.

Only last week, the Federal Communications Commission, implementing the 1992 cable TV re-regulation law, ordered most cable TV operators to roll back their subscription rates by 10%. And Vice President Al Gore--a proponent of national fiber-optic “information highways” that would parallel or exceed existing cable systems’ reach--is also a vocal opponent of the cable TV industry’s power.