Murdoch shoring up his war chest
BSkyB (BSYBF), in which 21st Century Fox owns a 39% stake, is buying Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland.
In addition to the cash payment, the U.K. firm will transfer its 21% stake in the National Geographic Channel to Fox.
Just four years ago, Murdoch was hoping to launch a full takeover of
BSkyB but dropped the plans after a phone hacking scandal at his
newspaper group.
Since then, competition in U.K. TV distribution has intensified. Telecom operator BT (BT) is mounting a challenge in sports -- the backbone of Sky's service -- and Amazon (AMZN, Tech30) and Netflix (NFLX, Tech30) pose a growing threat in streaming movies.
Murdoch now seems more interested in gaining a bigger slice of content production. Just last month, 21st Century Fox made an offer to buy Time Warner Inc (TWX) -- owner of CNN and CNNMoney -- worth about $80 billion at the time.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment