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Comment by dagw | Hacker News Reader

broadcast distribution and news/sports are being spun off

Is that official? Disney has bet (and lost) a lot of money on sports broadcast over the past few years. I could see them trying to consolidate at least Fox sports into their current bet on sports.

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It's in the top line of the press release:

https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/walt-disney-company-acquire...

The US network is being spun off.

But for instance they will own Sky - the biggest commercial broadcaster in Europe, and the UK's second biggest ISP...

In addition to this, Sky Sports is pretty much the only game in town in the UK when it comes to sports. Sky hold an insane amount of power in football, to the point where if they want a game to be played at a different time/day the fixture will change. The sheer amount of money in the Premier League today is down to Sky.

This is a linear market that I think Disney will be really interested in. It's an area where Netflix haven't entered (to my knowledge), and it's an area that no one can seem to do well.

BT Sport has made some in-roads, but Sky is definitely a dominate player.

IIRC, it's the only only pay-TV provider available in large parts of the UK (cable TV is only available in about 60% of the country last time I checked).

In the press release they indicate FS1 / FS2 will stay with the broadcast news and broadcast networks. They will keep the regional sports networks.

Yeah, RSNs are a different game. Sports in general is in decline; the RSNs are likely included to fill out ESPN's content deals to build a national sports streaming service. Things like Big 10 network have enough restrictions that the content could not be rebroadcast on ESPN or separate services.

Slightly ironic that ESPN itself has significantly scaled back baseball coverage/studio shows this year, yet they now own RSNs who have rights for 16 (by my count) MLB teams

They'd have to then avoid anticompetitive attention due to owning ESPN, though.

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