of New York, now wants to be the Ted Turner of Eastern Europe.

Before the Berlin Wall came crashing down, all of the television stations in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe were owned by the state. Most still are. Increasingly, though, private companies have been allowed to bring "Jeopardy'' and re-runs of "Dallas'' to the entertainment-starved masses.

Lauder's Central European Media Enterprises Ltd., based in London, was set up three years ago to invest in Eastern European TV stations. It has already created the only private TV station operating in the Czech Republic, is developing stations in Berlin and Nuremberg, Germany, and has acquired licenses to operate station in Poland.

Now the company -- which is registered in Bermuda -- is going public in the US, and analysts like its chances.

"This is a very good operation,'' said Charles Ronson, a fund manager with Balestra Capital and head of IPO Value Monitor. "I wouldn't be surprised if it does better than its offering price,'' Central European Media plans to sell four million Class A shares for between 12 and 14 each, raising about $47 million after expenses. It plans to use the proceeds to fund development-stage costs of the stations, repay debt to affiliates, fund its programming services unit, and for general corporate purposes.

There will be about 12.6 million shares outstanding after the offering -- being managed by Wertheim Schroder & Co. and Prudential Securities Inc. -- including 8.1 million of the more powerful Class B shares, held by insiders, carry 10 votes per share, compared to one vote for each Class A share. Lauder will have 55 percent of the company's voting power once the IPO is complete.

The 50-year-old Lauder, scion of the Estee Lauder fortune, has been making waves in the former Eastern Bloc for years. With his older brother Leonard running the cosmetics giant, Ronald, a former US ambassador to Austria who speaks German and French, has been establishing ties and starting businesses from the Rhine to the Black Sea.

With Mark Palmer, the former US ambassador to Hungary, Lauder formed Central European Development Corp. to invest in everything from a Hungarian vineyard to an Estonian cement factory to an East German engineering plant.

The company even has plans to build a business complex at perhaps the foremost symbol of the cold war, Germany's former East-West border crossing, better known as Checkpoint Charlie.

As the economies of Eastern Europe continue to unshackle and prosper, and more businesses are opened (Estee Lauder just opened a store in Prague, its third in the region), television is expected to become a boom business. Along with Central European Media, companies like Time Warner Inc. and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. are also trying to make inroads in the area.

These are all nascent markets without much advertising,'' says Arthur Gruen, a partner in the media and entertainment consulting firm Wilkofsky Gruen Associates. "But once the people get their acts together and the economies develop rapidly, companies will gain the mentality that they have to market their products.'' Some say the markets are already blossoming. In the Czech Republic, where the company's 66 percent-owned Nova TV station has introduced Western style talk shows, such as "Breakfast with Nova'', and movies like "Pretty Woman'' to audiences grown accustomed to blander fare, spending on TV advertising soared to $60 million in 1993 from $6 million two years earlier.

And in Poland, where Central European Media's NTP Plus SA recently won 12 regional TV licenses, television ad spending reached $136 million last year, up from $14 million in 1991.

The company is taking a different tack in Germany, where television has deeper roots.

While national networks are well established, the company is trying to capitalise on the growth of local stations, a relatively new concept in the country. Starting last year, some of Germany's 16 states began to award broadcast licenses to private companies.

Currently, there are three regional privately owned stations in Germany, and Central European Media has interests in two of them: It owns 43 percent of IA Berlin and 37 percent of the Nuremberg station. In the US, local and regional advertising now makes up about 30 percent of the total TV advertising pie.

Other areas that the company is trying to win rights to establish TV stations are Hungary, Slovakia and in the German regions of Stuttgart and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Ronson, of Balestra Capital, said the company only enters markets that have some kind of history of capitalism.

"They are never the most stepped-on republics in Eastern Europe, like Albania or Rumania,'' he said.

The company, though, first has to deal with its capital problems. Even with a successful IPO, the company says in its prospectus that those funds will last no more than a year, and "thereafter substantial additional capital will be required''.

That's making Mark Basham, an IPO analyst with Standard & Poor's, cautious about the company.

"We think the stock is a short-term buy, but the additional financing needs may dilute the interests of investors.'' And losses have increased each year as the company develops its stations, reaching $8.4 million in 1993.

The company posted revenue for the first time in 1994's first six-month period of $18.6 million. In that period, it loss rose to $8 million from $1.3 million in the year-earlier period. The company has amassed an accumulated deficit, as of June 30, of $16.7 million.