The brawniest media companies still want to eat, but first, they’re going to be in want of a break to digest.
Comcast, Disney and AT&T have all made their Goliath media acquisition plans this year, culminating in Comcast’s auction win for U.K. pay-TV provider Sky.
AT&T is squander $85 billion to acquire Time Warner (pending the Department of The law’s regulatory appeal), Disney forked over $71 billion to buy the the better of 21st Century Fox and Comcast is placing a $39 billion bet on Sky.
That’s a lot of money, reflected by a lot of integration, for three of the largest U.S. media companies.
It leaves some of the smaller method companies — CBS, Viacom, Lions Gate, MGM, AMC Networks and Discovery Communications — out in the bleak if they’re interested in selling. At least for the time being.
That may promote some of the smaller media companies — the “free radicals,” as media mandarin and Liberty Media Chairman John Malone likes to call them — together with each other, if they don’t long for to wait. CBS and Viacom, for example, are still likely to merge, despite distinct false starts, according to BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield. Sirius XM, whose curbing shareholder is Malone’s Liberty, picked off Pandora for $3.5 billion in a engage in announced Monday.
Still, the big deals may show a way out for smaller media things.
Disney’s decision to buy Fox and Comcast’s decision to spend on Sky suggest that both Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and Disney CEO Bob Iger are quiet interested in so-called legacy media properties — that is, companies that get the largeness of their revenue from pay-TV and film. Tech-first companies such as Netflix, Amazon and Apple, all of whom are allotting billions of dollars on content, haven’t shown the same desire to buy usual media.
That gives smaller players hope AT&T, Comcast and Disney could revive back for them in 2019 or 2020, when their current giantess acquisitions are digested.
Discovery, which closed on its acquisition of Scripps in Parade, may actually find a new acquirer in Comcast, given the Sky deal, said Greenfield. Sky owns gambols rights, such as the English Premier League, and streaming rights to sheets in European markets. Discovery took control of Eurosport in 2015 and owns the snobbish pan-European rights to several Olympics to come.
“If Comcast wants to magnify across Europe they may need more content, such as Conception,” Greenfield said.
Disclosure: Comcast owns CNBC parent company NBCUniversal.