(12-07-2017 02:10 AM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote: Wow. Why would you sell if you're Fox?? The only reason I can come up with is Fox wants to move towards OTA. It would also make Disney the biggest bundler bar none. Bigger than Turner. Bigger than Discovery Networks. That's a lot of eggs in one basket.
You're not thinking bigly enough. What the article said was that the Murdochs/Fox/News Corp brain trust don't believe that the Fox group is big enough to compete in an age of "MAGAF" Microsoft Amazon Google Apple Facebook. They tried to get bigger (Time Warner bid, 2014) and that didn't work out, so they're trying to cash out.
If that's the play, they'd like to cash out all of their media properties, but putting Fox Sports 1 and ESPN, or FOX OTA and ABC under the same corporate roof wouldn't pass US antitrust. And I suspect Fox News is a property that is hard to sell because of its reputation--any channel actively hated by 10-40% of the population is hard to sell, no matter how much money it makes.
It's not that Fox looked at the RSNs and said "Get rid of these." It's that the RSNs are part of the Fox/Newscorp cable media empire that is being sold.
It's very likely that, if a Fox/Disney sale goes through, the next step would be the Murdochs selling off the Fox OTA/Fox News/Fox Sports group. I don't know if that would be a coherent package, or if you'd split into Fox OTA and Fox Cable at that point, or if you'd split the three separately, or spin off Fox News into its own thing. (Fox OTA and Fox Sports would fit nicely with Time Warner, who doesn't have an OTA network. But Fox News/CNN would not pass muster.)
Or maybe the Fox / Fox News morning show makes it too hard to separate Fox OTA from Fox News? I don't watch morning newstalk tv so I don't pay much attention, but it's a big part of the TV network business--Matt LAuer and Katie Couric and Megyn Kelly and Al Roker are/were making big money because Good Morning America and Today etc make big money. (I may have those names wrong. But I think those all are/were big players on network morning shows.)