So what do we reckon will happen here? Is this Liberty selling most of their European cable business' to Vodafone like UPC and keeping VM for themselves? Perhaps as a possible prelude to merging VM with with their American companies. Don't forget Malone now controls Scripps, the owner of UKTV (Dave, UK Gold etc) or will. That deal hasn't finalised yet.
I don't get what his thinking is here.
Malone and Fries constantly talk about scale. They have that with their European operations, but unlike America, their European cable cos operate in different countries, different languages, laws etc etc. Perhaps they are just tired of running such disparately operations, but why buy them in the first place?
Perhaps they just want to concentrate on the English speaking world and sod everything else??
I think we need to keep an eye on the wider media landscape too here as Malone was talking to Viacom and CBS last year about a possible deal between them.
At the moment, Viacom and CBS are talking about merging back together again, so perhaps ultimately the new CBS/Viacom may become part of Malone's empire at some point.
Everyone is worried about Amazon, Netflix, Apple and Facebook. It's why Mudoch has sold out.
Malone now has significant media interests, but they are still much smaller than the new Disney to be, the new AT&T/Time Warner company (when that happens) Comcast/NBC and the likes of Amazon haven't really yet put all their tanlks on the field yet, they will..
Here's a quick reminder of what Malone de facto controls, if not owns:
Virgin Media
all3media (one of the UK's largest production houses) which makes stuff like Midsomer Murders, Hollyoaks and Wolf Hall.
Discovery
Eurosport
Scripps - the owner of UKTV
F1
Charter - the 2nd biggest cable co in America
Starz
OVC and HSN
a share of Lionsgate and not forgetting almost 10% of ITV.
and that's just the main stuff. If that were all merged together, that would be significant in itself, but merge all that with Viacom/CBS or someone else and you have an aboslute global goliath.
If that were to happen, expect a ITV-Ch5 merger soon afterwards.
Still no mobile deal, yet.
---------- Post added at 21:29 ---------- Previous post was at 21:07 ----------
And just from my predecessor thread to this one, thread here:
https://www.cableforum.uk/board/show...6#post35780236
A few posts from there:
Quote:
Originally Posted by gba93
Latest News on Vodafone/Liberty tie-up ... or not?
Vodafone/Virgin Media?
Independent/Evening Standard business editor James Ashton tweets:
Vodafone/Liberty talks must be all about UK/Germany. Voda outbid Lib for Kabel Deutschland. Now will it swap it for Virgin Media?
James Ashton
7:50 a.m. - 5 June 2015
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/business-32929073 |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pierre
Well it wouldn't be just for the UK. malone said Europe and Liberty is on the whole european.
I could see it happening but it would take a boat load of work on the vodafone side of things.
Vodafone would have to be split into two, incidentally not dissimilar to what C&W did before they were bought by Vodafone.
You would have Vodafone Europe and Vodafone rest of the world, I'm assuming the huge submarine cable network would be spun off with the RoTW, can't see Liberty wanting it.
I don't know. The question is do you destroy Vodafone to save it?
From what I can pick up around here, it could happen.
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My thinking here is, and there were numerous posts about it from others in my old thread, as Vodafone is being squeezed in the UK where once it was dominate, could it sell its UK operation to Malone?