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Shrek gazumps Mickey & Murdoch
Perhaps the cunning plan was to absorb Sky while still carrying a hefty risk premium ahead of the all important Premier League (PL) football rights negotiations and then reap the benefit when these were renewed for what turned out to be -14%/-£199m pa reduction. Unfortunately, with 21st Century Fox’s (21CF) bid stranded with the UK […]
Continue readingWazzup – 27 July 2017 – a results palooza!
A results deluge today as companies report Q2 numbers ahead of the August holidays. Updates from RELX, ITV, DMGT, Sky, A3M, S&P Global, Amazon, Comcast, Nielsen, Solocal, Barrick, Dow Chemical, Fiat Chrysler, Eastman Chemical, BASF, Air Products, Danone and VW, to name a few. RELX – H1 FY17 results. Fortunately, another steady […]
Continue readingSky – cutting the cord
What could possibly go wrong? Sky subscriptions are cyclically resilient because people go out less in recession and therefore spend more time at home where they value their telly subscriptions more. This was certainly true back in 2008 and before that for US cable in 2001. I should know, I was trotting out this argument […]
Continue readingSky’s response to rising churn and weaker subscriber growth is……to put prices up. Brilliant!
Yesterday, Sky announced its Q3 FY16 results (the Jan-Mar 2016 quarter) where it reported a slight deterioration in net subscriber additions in its core UK operation (of +70k QoQ vs +127K the year before) including an increase in churn from 10.1% to 10.7% notwithstanding a flat ARPU of £47. After the +6.8% UK sales increase […]
Continue readingThe old fox learns a new trick – Murdoch walks away from Time Warner
Having seen the outrageous premium Murdoch paid for the WSJ, markets must have been salivating over how much he might now stump up for Time Warner. Surely, the $86ps ($80bn) offer was a mere opening shot and that the old boy could be bounced into perhaps three figures, or so the narrative went. Not to […]
Continue readingBSkyB and the rising cost of growth
BSkyB: OK, so what’s the narrative to be? 21st Century Fox (Murdoch) parks some low yielding European payTV assets into a 39% owned subsidiary to raise at least £4.6bn of cash to help fund its (Murdoch’s) $80m Time Warner bid? As long as the market thinks that he will be back for the lot at […]
Continue readingMurdoch and other people’s money
So you’ve seen the headlines. First Fox’s proposals to consolidate its interests in Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland into BSkyB, described by many as a “tidying up” exercise. Now we are treated to something more substantial to explain the earlier moves; an $80bn (c.$86 ps) plus offer for Time Warner. The newswires are of course […]
Continue readingECJ’s guidance on FAPL and Karen Murphy and the law on unintended consequences
Once upon a time, small and impoverished countries could still enjoy top quality TV programmes, even if it meant having to acquire most of them from abroad. This was because the value of these secondary rights reflected these countries capacity to pay and the basis on which the programme rights were sold and bought; by country. To […]
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