John Malone is eyeing the "wild" yields offered by the debt of other media and communications companies, echoing the tactics through which the Liberty Media (NYSE: L - News) chairman built his cable empire in the US and Europe.

Some of the most attractive opportunities thrown up by the global financial crisis were in debt, Greg Maffei, chief executive of Liberty Media, told FT.com in a video interview.

"When you look at how these junk bond yields have spiked ... I think this will be looked back historically as a pretty attractive time to be in high yield," he said. The group's Liberty Capital offshoot "will be investing in a lot of debt," he added.

Mr Malone's ownership of debt in companies such as United Pan-Europe Communications and Telewest gave Tele-Communications Inc, his former company, a central, if sometimes controversial, role in the restructuring of the European cable sector at the start of the decade.

Now, Mr Maffei said: "The yields on some of these senior instruments ... are wild. You don't have to go to the 35 per cent on a Ford bond. You can just look in our space where senior debt is trading at 12 and 15 per cent for relatively low risk. That's very attractive."

Liberty would be "dipping its toes" rather than wading in with large debt purchases, he said, but it considered investments in some senior debt as "frankly a lot less risky than the junior instruments or the equity".

Mr Maffei cooled speculation about its chances of exchanging a 103m-shares stake in Time Warner for ownership of the dial-up access business of AOL, Time Warner's online brand.

"I think at the end of the day we're probably not the right buyer for that business," he said.

Mr Maffei said many content companies still seemed expensive as acquisition targets, but added: "There are plenty that look cheap. Viacom is a great example."

Sumner Redstone, chairman of Viacom and CBS, was forced by the slide in both companies' shares to sell stock last week, but analysts doubt he would be easily parted from either company.