At the very least, the Murdochs will be the 3rd largest shareholder, after Vanguard and Laurene. But how active is she, since she reduced her holdings after Steve's death by 50%.
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News Disney and Fox come to terms -- announcement soon; huge IP acquisition
- Thread starter ohioguy
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At the very least, the Murdochs will be the 3rd largest shareholder, after Vanguard and Laurene. But how active is she, since she reduced her holdings after Steve's death by 50%.
Big difference between owning the IP and distributing the products of that IP.
As I posted previously, only if there is still a master or high quality first run print still in existence for those first three.
Andsome
Well-Known Member
Personally, I want Chef Ramsay to resurrect Kitchen Nightmares so he can do an episode at the ABC Commissary.
Sirwalterraleigh
Premium Member
They claimed they destroyed it...in a teenage tantrum style rage. The people vs george Lucas is the greatest film ever.
But do we buy that?
Progress.City
Well-Known Member
I see Disney buying Lightstorm next, after Avatar 2-5 are finished and Cameron is ready to retire...
What studio is distributing Battle Angel?
True. I've also read that George had his own master of each film and what was destroyed were the company's masters. It would be nice to know if any of these rumors are true. If not, Disney has a gold mine and I'm surprised it doesn't release them eventually.
Next Big Thing
Well-Known Member
Are you kidding? The Fox Sports regional channels were a HUGE pickup by Disney to help out ESPN's streaming service and make it more compelling to buy into. The YES Network alone (Broadcaster of Yankees games) has an insane amount of subscribers for a Regional Sports Network.
the.dreamfinder
Well-Known Member
What happens when the local teams form their own regional networks like NESN? Why do they need a middleman anymore?
Disney needs to get itself out of the sports business, they don’t own the content.
But nah. “I’m Bob Iger and this is Jackass”.
EDIT: With the exception of YES, which the Yankees only have a 20% stake, FSN owns the regional networks. When do these teams create their own wholly owned RSNs? Comcast’s major RSNs are partially/majority owned by the local teams like NBCS Philadelphia and NBCS Chicago. Less incentive to leave.
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Sirwalterraleigh
Premium Member
...but...will they be valuable enough to move the needle and get people to buy them in somekind of bundled arrangement? Because that's what they're going to try to do.
jakeman
Well-Known Member
Maybe.
I would say the market is too young to make that determination.
From an anecdotal perspective, I buy the MLB.tv package every year because I like baseball. I don't come from a region of the country that is inundated with sports teams (being from the area of your namesake). However, we have a metric crap ton of transplants in NC. I could see folks from say...Detroit...who don't have routine access to their teams but don't want to pay for total league streaming services from the major sports when almost all the games are shown on Fox Sports Detroit.
MLB.tv has started single team packages but those are still around $80 a season (versus about $120 for the whole package). Taking the Detroit example, extrapolating that out to every major sports league (MLB, NBA, NHL, NBA, and the Big Ten Network), you're looking at about $400 to keep up with your "local" teams. That's a pretty large range of a price point under that.
The obvious counter to all this is the leagues taking their games away from the regional sports networks and making them exclusive to streaming services. I can't see that happening in the foreseeable future. While our local boogeyman ESPN may or may not be struggling depending on which agenda you believe, regional sports seem to be, from my very quick Google search, doing well.
People are majority regionally aligned still, not league aligned. I just can't see that behavior changing and because of that, there will be a place for regional sports networks.
Frank the Tank
Well-Known Member
I’d argue that sports networks are actually the *only* channels that move the needle to buy any type of bundled arrangement. I think a lot of people here still don’t understand how much these sports networks make in terms of money: just one month of ESPN subscriber fee revenue is equal to the domestic gross of a Star Wars or Avengers movie. (Note that this doesn’t even include ad revenue, which also happens to be among the highest in TV.) The second highest subscriber fee channel on anyone’s cable package is that market’s regional sports network. Nothing else is even close (and by a magnitude of several multiples).
This isn’t because cable companies are being charitable to sports networks. Instead, it’s because those cable companies know that sports are the #1 reason why the households that matter the most (the ones willing to pay full price) buy cable bundles in the first place. This makes sense in the marketplace because you can find virtually every other type of content in multiple forms (e.g. streaming, downloads, TV, Blu-Rays, etc) at any time and anywhere. The difference with sports is that those programs are (a) live (AKA the only programs that people watch commercials en masse anymore, which is reflected in very high ad rates), (b) exclusive (e.g. when ESPN has the rights to a game, the *only* place you can see that game is on an ESPN platform), and (c) have no substitute (e.g. when an Alabama fan wants to watch an Alabama game, you can’t substitute an Ohio State game in its place and expect that Bama fan to be satisfied). As a result, sports networks have the most leverage to demand the highest fees by far.
This Disney-Fox deal was dead a few weeks ago, but it was resurrected quickly. What was the biggest thing that changed? The regional sports networks are now included (and you can see that the proposed price nearly doubled as a result). The RSNs are like ESPN on steroids at the local level - if you want a truly viable bundled offering in the New York market, for instance, you *need* the YES Network. (Look at the lack of DISH Network penetration in the NYC market because it has never carried YES compared all of the other markets where it does carry the local RSN.)
I was initially shocked that Fox is willing to part with these regional sports networks in the first place. They’re massive cash generators and would only serve to give ESPN even more leverage than it has now in the marketplace (while weakening the leverage of FS1, which Fox is keeping). Why would Fox be willing to give up all that scale and bundling power that it has developed in sports and entertainment?
However, when I took a step back and reminded myself that Fox isn’t really a truly independent company and is essentially the Murdoch family business that happens to be publicly traded, it all makes more sense. The Murdochs are about the become the largest shareholders of TWDC (creating an even larger and more powerful media behemoth than ever before) while still retaining Fox OTA/News/Sports as their personal bully pulpit on the side. This makes total sense for the Murdochs specifically in a way that wouldn’t have made sense for a truly independent Fox entity.
plutofan15
Well-Known Member
This.
Janir
Well-Known Member
Seconded! It's the one Marvel property they really got 'right'. (as in true to the comic, not gross sales)
the.dreamfinder
Well-Known Member
Good post, but I’m not sure if the Fox RSNs are a good business to get into. Disney, the Walt Disney part, has been successful because it created content so beloved, so valuable that they were able to get deals that no other company could. Recall RKO Pictures, Disney’s longtime distributor of features and shorts like “Snow White”, “Pinocchio”, “Fantasia” and “Peter Pan”? RKO’s long dead, but back in the fifties, after they balked at having to distribute certain Disney films like the “True Life Adventures”. Well, Disney was now capable enough to self distribute and thus Buena Vista Distribution was born. Distribution is meaningless without content. “Content is king”, as Sumner Redstone liked to say. And if content is king, it’s doubly so if combined with wholly owned distribution.
We’re going to reach that point with sports. ESPN, and FSN, don’t own their most valuable content; live sports. Live sports will continue to demand value in a way the rest of the cable bundle won’t. Problem being, however, if fewer people want to buy cable and sports fans don’t want to pay for the rest of the cable bundle, then sports teams/colleges have to make a decision. Why have a middle man like FSN distribute your content when they don’t necessarily provide added value to you, but skim off your broadcast revenue $$$? If you build your own cable channel with the other local teams, it’s not so hard. The technical hurdles aren’t that big and can be easily overcome. And you know what they can do once they don’t have to go through a distributor? They can offer streaming rights to their games by themselves without a cable subscription, which they can’t do now because of blackout restrictions.
Disney needs to stop distributing other people’s content, especially live sports. The Fox deal is all about distributing other people’s content. It’s a deal that’s optimized for today, not tomorrow. Disneh doesn’t need the expensive overhead of a company like Sky. Disney doesn’t need the Fox film studio or the cablers, they can reactivate Touchstone and produce prestige television for Hulu through ABC Studios. Disney doesn’t need largesse to compete, it needs quality and it needs to own all its content because content and distribution are a powerful force and they already have the building blocks to do so.