HomeWelcome to another edition of the WNR. It was another slow news week, and so this is going to be another short one. Some of you are probably too busy watching the World Cup to worry about copyright issues, or how streaming is taking over everything. I get it, and I would be too, if the time differences were a little kinder for those of us here in Australia.
Let’s get on with it then.
Disney may own Star Wars, but it actually doesn’t own the distribution rights to the original trilogy … not until they buy Fox
Disney’s bid to buy Fox’s film and TV business now has some serious competition in the form of a rival bid from Comcast. The telecommunication company has to react to rival AT&T’s takeover of Time Warner, which took place last week and was quickly followed by the launch of AT&T’s streaming product, WatchTV.
Comcast’s bid put pressure on Disney to up their earlier offer, and this they did too, now offering more cash on top of their original stock only offer. Throughout all of this, Fox has always said they prefer to do business with Disney and the new offer cements this believe.
Disney wants Fox not only to re-unite its Marvel properties (not to mention the distribution rights to the original Star Wars trilogy with the rest of the franchise), but may also needs Fox’s content for its own streaming product to be launched next year. When that happens, the new yet unnamed streaming platform will be more akin to Netflix than AT&T’s WatchTV, which focuses more on live streaming of TV channels, some of which are now owned by AT&T (including CNN, TBS and TNT). And with both Disney and Fox’s library of content, the new streaming service will offer some serious competition to Netflix.
Fox shareholders will hold a special meeting on July 10 to vote on the potential merger.
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Other than that, there wasn’t anything else that was of particular interest. Hopefully there will be more stuff to cover next week. Until then …
