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Photographer: Simon Dawson / Bloomberg
Among all the strange twists of the one-month-long exhibition between 21st Century Fox – Walt Disney and Comcast, this weekend's sealed auction to determine the future of UK pay TV provider Sky Plc is perhaps the strangest.
As the the Wall Street newspaper note, the UK Takeover Panel did not run the process often and when it did, it never did it for a company the size of Sky, valued at around 36 billion dollars. Still, the potential benefits of owning Sky far outweigh the risks associated with the deal. Let's take a closer look at how these multi-billion dollar monoliths got into the situation.
The media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, president and principal shareholder of Fox, launched Sky Television in 1989 as an analog satellite television service with nine channels, including Sky News. A year later, the Australian-born mogul created a merger with his rival BSB, creating British Sky Broadcasting, known as BSkyB. The company has since been renamed as Sky.
The Murdoch media group, then called News Corp., which is the current name of its publishing company, first met Sky in 2010 to buy the 61% of the pay TV provider it did not own. already. These talks were abandoned a year later in the midst of protestshe scandalized the hacking phone involving Murdoch News from the world this eventually led to the closure of the tabloid. The Sky agreement was resurrected in 2016, but US politicians have raised objections to this because of concerns over Murdoch's influence media properties are responsible for roughly 20% of the country's population news consumption.
Earlier this year, Murdoch stunned Wall Street by announcing plans to sell most of its decades-old entertainment assets to Walt Disney, whose CEO Bob Iger described Sky as a "jewel" of the Fox. His Comcast counterpart, Brian Roberts, is also in love with the company. Their enthusiasm is understandable.
Sky has more than 22 million customers in five countries (the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Australia and Ireland). The company also has rights to football matches in the American Premier League, which include teams that fans may have heard about, like Arsenal and Manchester United. It spends about 6 billion pounds ($ 7.8 billion) in content each year.
Both companies have compelling reasons buy Sky D one hand, quality assets are not very often marketed. The UK pay-TV service will help Disney launch its streaming service, including its planned family offering for next year in Europe. Otherwise, Disney should start from scratch. Comcast could use Sky to help it grow outside of the United States, where its growth prospects are otherwise limited.
I've seen experts say that Comcast needed Sky more than Disney and vice versa. Sky's sports programming would be a perfect fit for Comcast's NBC Sports and Disney's ESPN Sports Cable. Comcast's MSNBC and CNBC cable channels, just like Disney's ABC News, would benefit from joining Sky News.
Disney has already beaten Comcast for Fox's entertainment assets, prompting the Philadelphia-based company to turn to Sky. Whatever company loses Sky, it will undoubtedly issue a statement stating that the deal would have been nice, but not essential for its future plans. If that were true, neither Comcast nor Disney would have bothered to bid at the start.
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Photographer: Simon Dawson / Bloomberg
Among all the strange twists of the one-month-long exhibition between 21st Century Fox – Walt Disney and Comcast, this weekend's sealed auction to determine the future of UK pay TV provider Sky Plc is perhaps the strangest.
As the the Wall Street newspaper note, the UK Takeover Panel did not run the process often and when it did, it never did it for a company the size of Sky, valued at around 36 billion dollars. Still, the potential benefits of owning Sky far outweigh the risks associated with the deal. Let's take a closer look at how these multi-billion dollar monoliths got into the situation.
The media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, president and principal shareholder of Fox, launched Sky Television in 1989 as an analog satellite television service with nine channels, including Sky News. A year later, the Australian-born mogul created a merger with his rival BSB, creating British Sky Broadcasting, known as BSkyB. The company has since been renamed as Sky.
The Murdoch media group, then called News Corp., which is the current name of its publishing company, first met Sky in 2010 to buy the 61% of the pay TV provider it did not own. already. These talks were abandoned a year later in the midst of protestshe scandalized the hacking phone involving Murdoch News from the world this eventually led to the closure of the tabloid. The Sky agreement was resurrected in 2016, but US politicians have raised objections to this because of concerns over Murdoch's influence media properties are responsible for roughly 20% of the country's population news consumption.
Earlier this year, Murdoch stunned Wall Street by announcing plans to sell most of its decades-old entertainment assets to Walt Disney, whose CEO Bob Iger described Sky as a "jewel" of the Fox. His Comcast counterpart, Brian Roberts, is also in love with the company. Their enthusiasm is understandable.
Sky has more than 22 million customers in five countries (the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Australia and Ireland). The company also has rights to football matches in the American Premier League, which include teams that fans may have heard about, like Arsenal and Manchester United. It spends about 6 billion pounds ($ 7.8 billion) in content each year.
Both companies have compelling reasons buy Sky D one hand, quality assets are not very often marketed. The UK pay-TV service will help Disney launch its streaming service, including its planned family offering for next year in Europe. Otherwise, Disney should start from scratch. Comcast could use Sky to help it grow outside of the United States, where its growth prospects are otherwise limited.
I've seen experts say that Comcast needed Sky more than Disney and vice versa. Sky's sports programming would be a perfect fit for Comcast's NBC Sports and Disney's ESPN Sports Cable. Comcast's MSNBC and CNBC cable channels, just like Disney's ABC News, would benefit from joining Sky News.
Disney has already beaten Comcast for Fox's entertainment assets, prompting the Philadelphia-based company to turn to Sky. Whatever company loses Sky, it will undoubtedly issue a statement stating that the deal would have been nice, but not essential for its future plans. If that were true, neither Comcast nor Disney would have bothered to bid at the start.
