THERE’S no way he pulls this deal together, Bill Daugherty remembers thinking. It was more than four years ago, and Daugherty — then an executive with the National Basketball Association — was sitting at a table in the New York City headquarters of USA Networks, surrounded by turf-protecting top-level managers from a dizzying variety of disciplines: sports team owners, players associations, broadcasters, merchandisers, ticket sellers, the lot. At the head of the table was Jonathan Miller, who was running the nascent interactive division of Barry Diller’s USA Networks. He pitched a plan to these oft-warring factions: Let’s do a deal to sell tickets to games and hawk sports merchandise on USA’s Home Shopping Network while we broadcast games on USA. Miller said: “This will work and it will be a terrific win for everybody here, or five or six parties around this table can screw it up. My job is to pull it together.” “He sold it on a macro level and worked like crazy on an individual level,” said Daugherty, now co-chief executive of the Excite Network and a longtime friend of Miller’s. “And he didn’t just do it once, he did it seven more times” with other sports leagues. This sort of collaborative orchestration is what Miller brings to AOL Time Warner as the company’s new chief executive of America Online, according to those who know him.

　　A 45-year-old Harvard University graduate and high school member of the New York City math team, Miller has a keen analytical eye and an amiable personality groomed under Diller’s tutelage. “You can’t be in Barry Diller’s company without being someone who works as part of a team,” said an entertainment industry source. Miller joined USA in 1997 and quit in June, as his job had essentially disappeared. Last December, Diller sold USA’s entertainment properties to Vivendi Universal and renamed the remaining assets — such as the Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster and the Expedia travel booking site — USA Interactive, which he then ran. This meant Miller’s position, running USA’s interactive businesses — had become duplicative. The key lesson Miller learned from Diller: “Barry is relentless,” he said, in an interview the first day in AOL. “He does not stop once he is on a mission. He is a builder and he will not stop.” Miller is also described as a builder, rich in industry contacts that may be able to help the troubled America Online unit, which has experienced flattened subscriber growth and crashing advertising revenue. AOL Time Warner Chairman Steve Case hopes Miller can do for America Online what Don Logan — now the company’s chairman of its Media & Communications Group — did as head of Time Inc.: Revitalize a business that some had written off. “Most people thought Time’s best days in the past. Don rebuilt that team and focused on the reader,” Case said in an interview Tuesday. “Jon brings a fresh understanding of what is the right way to generate additional revenues beyond basic subscription fees.”

　　Miller cut his marketing teeth in the National Basketball Association, where he ran its television productions from 1988 to 1993. An avid basketball player at more than 6-foot-3, Miller can “shoot the lights out,” said longtime friend Bill Jemas. When Miller and Jemas were at the NBA, the video production shop was not growing at the same clip as the league, which commissioner David Stern was effectively marketing as a world sport with superstars such as Larry Bird, Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson. “The people in NBA Entertainment used to make videos of the teams they liked,” recalled Jemas, now the chief operating officer of Marvel Enterprises, the comic book company. “There were a lot of Celtics fans there, so every year, they made a Celtics video. Which was great for the 5 percent of the NBA fans who liked the Celtics, but nobody else.” Miller persuaded the video division to help him overhaul the operation and turn out a variety of videos. He signed deals with record labels to use their music on the NBA’s videos and the NBA’s television shows, such as Inside Stuff. Then he established a retail distribution system for the videos. The result? “In the entire time we were there, we beat the NFL in exactly one product category — home video,” said Jemas. “That was the only area where we were ahead of the 800-pound gorilla that is the NFL.”

　　If anything has prepared Miller to take over America Online, it is his experience at USA, said the entertainment industry source. One of America Online’s biggest challenges is moving its service — which claims to have 34 million subscribers — from dial-up to high-speed Internet service, otherwise known as broadband. At USA, Diller calls his shopping experience “near-broadband”: Consumers watch a high-quality presentation of goods for sale on their televisions then go to the Home Shopping Network Web site to make their purchase. “The faster [America Online] accepts that is their future, the faster they will plan to be the best service for people in that broadband environment,” the source said, adding that Miller “will make AOL relevant for the broadband world.”