Kerry Stokes was fidgety.
Not nervous, but clearly psyching himself up. In the same room at Melbourne's modern spacious museum was James Packer and his mother Ros. Even a room that size is not big enough for two businessmen of this stature.
They had travelled to the same city for the launch of veteran media buyer Harold Mitchell's biography Living Large.
Stokes and Packer had fallen out spectacularly over a high profile, expensive court battle, in which Stokes' Seven Network alleged his competitors – which included News Limited and companies linked to Packer – conspired to prevent its fledgling pay TV operation C7 from securing Australian football and rugby league rights.
Stokes lost the fierce battle, which stretched over 120 hearing days and cost the parties about $200 million in legal fees.
Now staring at his opponent again, recalls one observer at the launch, Stokes said: "right, I'm going to do it".
What happened next is a reminder, say those who know Stokes, that he should not be underestimated.
Right now there are certainly those asking if Stokes is losing a golden touch that has kept "the boy from nowhere" in business for more than half a century.
As he enters his 75th year, Stokes' fortune has shrunk to it lowest since 2009 during the height of the financial crisis.
While still officially a billionaire – with an estimated wealth of $2.2 billion, according to BRW – Stokes' prime investments in media and resources are battling significant cyclical and structural challenges.
He is not standing still. Far from it. His response has been a been a year of fierce deal making that has diversified his fortune across oil and gas, financial services and subscription video to take on US streaming giant Netflix.
One wonders what the doubters would say watching the man, then aged in his late 60s with his trademark stoop, as he walked straight up to Packer at Mitchell's book launch.
"You could tell that the hatred between those two men was something that was playing on him and he walked up and shook hands [with Packer]," says the observer.
"They had a 10 or 15 minute conversation. He just looked visibly relieved."
Stokes is still best known, like Packer once was, as a media mogul. But he has investments in property, mining services, iron ore and most recently oil and gas, not to mention a vast private art collection which requires three full-time staff for its maintenance.
He began his career in television installing TV antennas in a fast-growing Perth in the late 1950s. In that job, amid the seemingly endless sprawl of roof tops, he saw the potential of real estate, and jumped into the industry. By the end of the 1960s he had become a millionaire, building shopping centres and was on track to build an empire that would include newspapers, television stations, and a portfolio of mining companies.
His energy is impressive. He exercises up to two-and-a-half hours a day, maintaining his figure in a way that would put men half his age to shame.
"When you bump into him, it like bumping into a piece of iron," says a former business associate. "He's really strong and really fit".
And Stokes isn't done. Not by a long shot.
Only last month he earned plaudits for timing after his Seven Group spent more than $100 million on scooping up 179 million shares, or 13.8 per cent, of oil and gas explorer and producer Beach Energy.
The splurge took place after Beach's share price halved in six months and the price of oil fell below $US40 a barrel.
"It's obviously an opportunistic acquisition within their field of expertise given [Seven Group] chief executive Don Voelte's history with Woodside," Morningstar analyst Tim Mann said at the time.
Voelte, who was Woodside's chief executive for seven years until 2011, agreed it had an opportunistic edge. "But we wouldn't have done it if we didn't want to invest in that industry".
Indeed, the Beach purchase rivalled Seven's bitter drawn-out legal battle to take over Nexus Energy for $200 million. But when Stokes moved on the distressed company a year earlier when the price of oil was more that $90 a barrel.
Is this therefore a case of his timing being less than perfect?
Despite having Voelte's rich oil and gas experience, it was his not first choice for diversification.
In fact on top of his list was healthcare. But for one reason or another, he couldn't find a way into the sector, which would have been a reversal of the strategy the late Paul Ramsay who built his wealth on hospitals before gaining control of Seven's regional affiliate Prime in the mid 1980s.
Next he looked at agriculture, particularly gypsum and phosphate. That made sense considering Australia's biggest mining company BHP investing heavily in potash in a bid to help feed the world.
But again, Stokes couldn't find an entrée into the sector, and so oil and gas came into the picture.
"It's all based on a specific strategy," Voelte says, adding the slump has made the move easier in the long run even if Nexus now looks expensive in comparison.
He expects the oil rout will continue for the next 12 to 18 months. But he sees that as advantage rather than a disadvantage.
"We would like to see the oil price go lower for a while longer because. It's usually when things go down in a cycle, the further they stay down, the recovery is stronger and longer.
"The other benefit is more good stuff becomes available," said Voelte, highlighting Seven's appetite for more acquisitions.
"We are always on the prowl. We see value where others don't."
And this is where Voelte particularly praises his boss.
"Kerry has got good eyes. He sees through things. He sees through people, he sees through assets, he sees through businesses. If you watch him, he will stare right through the back of your head. He sees things that I think other people don't see," he tells BusinessDay from Colorado, which is a favoured winter bolthole for Stokes.
"Kerry always laughs at me and says 'I don't know anything about oil and gas, I'm really relying on you'. I laugh every time he tells me that because he … knows a hell of a lot more about everything than he ever lets on to.
"He's picked up everything he needs to know about oil and gas. He's not a shrinking violet in any industry and I think he's got very comfortable in oil and gas very quickly."
Even those who have experienced Stokes' wrath, praise his ability to "see around corners". This is because while he is hands on, it more about strategy than interfering with day-to-day operations.
"The angrier he gets the quieter he is. He'd say to you 'I'm very disappointed … I feel like you have let me down', he'd actually say that very quietly," said a former business associate.
"Whereas if you think of a Packer of a Murdoch or someone else … he's very calm from that perspective, very different."
Something he shares with Murdoch is a love of newspapers. He has owned the Canberra Times in the late 1980s and '90s and he is unlikely to sell The West Australian, despite analysts marking his media company Seven West Media down for its print assets.
Citi media analyst Justin Diddams has a "neutral" rating for Stoke's media company Seven West Media, meaning he doesn't recommend buying or sell its stock.
"The company operates the leading free-to-air TV broadcaster in Australia and a monopoly newspaper business in Western Australia. It looks well positioned to leverage future growth in advertising, given its dominant position in the media landscape," Mr Diddams wrote in an investor note last month.
"However, the structural threats to the print assets are likely to weigh on sentiment and earnings expectations."
Mr Diddams' comments came after the company posted a $994 million interim net loss after tax after writing down the value of its media assets by $1.1 billion.
But it's not just print. Investors are also questioning whether free-to-air television will follow newspapers in the migration of advertising to online, which has savaged print revenues. This has been underlined by the welter of streaming television services that have launched recently including American behemoth Netflix.
Metropolitan advertising for all free-to-air networks slid 3 per cent in the six months to December 31, according to the figures compiled by accounting firm KPMG. It is contrast to the corresponding period in 2013, which saw a 5 per cent rise to $1.6 billion.
But in the past 10 years, using the same figures, free-to-air TV advertising revenue has stagnated.
Harold Mitchell, who is the chairman of lobby group Free TV Australia, said the rise of digital advertising had surpassed the arrival of television 60 years ago as the biggest upheaval in media history.
"Digital advertising is heading towards 40 per cent," Mitchell says.
"That's the greatest change in modern media history, even [the arrival of] television wasn't has dramatic as that.
"But that doesn't mean it's the end of the world. It just means that you have to adapt and very successful media have done it. Newspapers were here when television came along, and newspaper people got into different forms of television."
Mitchell says it is "the product and ideas" which secures the survival of media companies, not the medium itself.
"There are many ways of delivering a product but if you walk away from the product and ideas then you walk away from the future.
"We can get carried away with all sorts of things, if you look at all the years gone by with video tape and everything else that's happened, it's products and ideas. It will be delivered in a lot of ways."
So how does that play out in the world of Kerry Stokes? This year he merged the newsrooms of The West Australian with Channel Seven Perth. It is now the most integrated media team in Australia if not the world, allowing Seven's news bulletins to run on the paper's website, as well as powerful cross-promotional opportunities.
Seven West Media chief executive Tim Worner – who began his career at Seven as a journalist in Perth in the 1980s before taking on executive roles in production and programming – says he subscribes to Mitchell's philosophy of creating once and "exploit everywhere" across television, online and mobile.
Worner estimates almost 80 per cent of profit before interest, taxes and depreciation "now comes from the television business and a big part of our strategy going forward is really taking that television business … and using that marketing grunt to grow new revenue streams."
"We have got a very strong focus of exploiting our content beyond the first screen. Say for a show like Sunday Night, which goes to air at 7pm on a Sunday, the guys making that show now know that's the first time that content will be seen but it is by far from the last time."
Seven also likes to talk about its credentials to battle another threat: subscription video-on-demand (SVOD), or streaming. Worner says about eight years ago the network recognised the potential of its audiences splintering to digital platforms.
To combat this, the network believed it had to create and control most its own content, so it wouldn't be "beholden to someone supplying them that content and coming to an arrangement on distribution windows".
"We set of down a path of trying to continually increase the size of our content bank and trying to make sure that we were in a position when this multi type screen eventuated, which it has now, that we are in a position to actually take advantage of it, not really be challenged by it," Worner says.
For this reason, he said Seven was a "good dance partner" when media companies began joining forces last year to offer SVOD services.
But, again, its streaming partnership, Presto Entertainment, with local pay TV monopoly Foxtel sounds good in theory but is struggling to gain consumer awareness, according to a study released last week.
The Venture Consulting report found only 15 per cent of survey participants knew of Presto, compared with 32 per cent for US streaming giant Netflix and 25 per cent for Stan, a joint venture between Nine Entertainment and Fairfax Media, owner of BusinessDay. Perth-based Quickflix had 27 per cent awareness.
Seven and Foxtel are starting to increase advertising for Presto both on television and billboards. But Worner, perhaps warily, describes SVOD as a "delicate balancing act" and not the "holy grail".
"I don't see this as a sudden revenue storm that is just going to dump large amounts of new money into our coffers.
"I certainly think that over time streaming content is going to grow very quickly not least because of sheer convenience."
This, Worner says, was evident during this year's Australian Open tennis tournament – where Seven had secured an all rights deal, including broadcast and digital. The network streamed all matches, even those not on the live TV broadcast.
"That had never been done before. 70 per cent of the live streams were on phones and tablets. Television is going mobile because it's more convenient.
"I still maintain that the more fragmented the audience becomes, the more powerful and more valuable free-to-air television becomes because it becomes the only media where you can amass a huge audience and deliver a message very powerfully to that mass audience simultaneously."
But he acknowledges that Seven needs to be in the subscription video-on-demand space and says the network has a supportive chairman in Kerry Stokes.
"He is a very good thinker and is prepared to challenge convention, and has a history of that," he says.
And there are other things to ponder. Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull this month proposed changes to media ownership that would allow more mergers between newspapers, TV networks and radio stations.
But Mr Turnbull denied Foxtel's request to give it access to more sporting events that reserved for free-to-air television, protecting Nine, Ten and Seven's dominance of sports broadcasting.
This angered Rupert Murdoch, who tweeted "Turnbull's plans to scrap certain rules suit buddies at Nine". This was referring to speculation that the changes would beneficial to Nine, allowing it take over Ten Network Holding's regional affiliate Southern Cross.
Tim Worner has been quiet about Mr Turnbull's plan, as has Stokes, who has to date refused to the back the abolition of cross-media ownership rules unless its part of a broader package on media reform.
And Stokes has his own ways of making his thoughts known to Canberra.
One example often held up of his influence stems from January 2010 when then communications minister Stephen Conroy spent an afternoon skiing with Stokes around the slopes of Vail, Colorado. Weeks later the government announced that the Seven Network and its commercial rivals were to receive a $250 million licence fee rebate.
Harold Mitchell says despite Stokes being aged in his mid-70s, he still has the zest needed to make businesses successful.
"He's warm hearted, a good friend but intense about his approach to whatever he is doing.
"He's always been very patient in order to achieve an ultimate outcome. He is careful in his planning. And that patience is what has always paid off. You should never underestimate him."
Stokes declined to be interview for this article but told senior Fairfax journalist Elizabeth Knight during a rare interview in 2010 that he attributed his success to nature not nurture.
"I'm lucky I had signposts in my life," he told Knight, while picking at sashimi and leaving the rice.
"At important times I got pointed in the right direction by particular circumstances. You can choose a direction that will take you into something that isn't going to take you where you want to go or you can choose a direction which is down the right path."
