[OLD BOY]

On the other hand, John Malone has indicated that he wants to bring maximum content to cable customers. He claimed that it was not necessary to actually own the content rights to do this.

To me, that sounds like a sensible policy, given the huge sums involved in bidding wars. These costs will only increase as global players attempt to extend their reach across the world.

However, this strategy only works effectively where the companies holding those rights are prepared to accept payments to enable their acquired content to be screened on other platforms.

What is interesting is comparing what John Malone said a relatively short while ago with what he has actually been doing in the meantime.

On top of his stake in Discovery, he has extended his interest in content ownership with the recent Lionsgate-Starz deals. Now he is reported to have other targets in his sights, such as AMC, Scripps and possibly Viacom.

By going along this route, John Malone is putting himself in a much better position to offer incentives to companies such as Sky to ensure that currently exclusive content is made available to cable customers. If deals cannot be done, then Liberty Global will be able to withhold a considerable amount of content from players who won’t play.

Given his stakes in these other companies, he must be in a position to create new channels (conventional and/or on demand) with all that content. These channels could be exclusive to cable, although much of the content could be recycled. This would certainly help Virgin Media to argue that it had channels not available on other platforms.

It will be very interesting to see how things change over the coming months and years.