It wouldn't be a merger - at best ITN might buy it but if they wanted to go back into that market they'd probably be better off relaunching themselves as any takeover of Sky News would probably see a large number of redundancies anyway.
A "merger" with a Murdoch company would pretty much be the death knell for ITN.
Isn't Sky News pretty heavily subsidised by the wider Sky network? That's why threatening to divest it = threatening to close it. Selling it on as a loss-making concern isn't a great business opportunity is it
Isn't Sky News pretty heavily subsidised by the wider Sky network? That's why threatening to divest it = threatening to close it. Selling it on as a loss-making concern isn't a great business opportunity is it
The idea is
force the regulators' hands
to making a decision. The Murdoch clan may still be reeling over their failed attempt at taking over Australia's Network Ten (as well as stopping the successful CBS bid), the Fox News brand and all related allegations regarding Fox News talent possibly derailing the full Fox takeover bid and a possible Disney buyout of 21CF properties that exclude the broadcast network, news and sports divisions. This "forcing someone's hands" bit also comes at an interesting time: In New York City, two local news websites DNAInfo and Gothamist, were shut down by the owner, Joe Ricketts --a donor to the Trump campaign and part of the family who owns the Chicago Cubs baseball organisation--- due to staff agreeing to unionise. Ricketts has said both publicly and privately that should the staff unionise, he will shut the sites down (including its sister sites who did not unionise) The staff, colloquially called "DNAist" voted to unionise and six days later, all sites were shut down, citing DNAist "not been sufficient to support the expenses". For a period of close to a week, all sites had their material taken down and replaced with a message from the owner that read in part:
Quote:
But DNAinfo is, at the end of the day, a business, and businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure. And while we made important progress toward building DNAinfo into a successful business, in the end, that progress hasn't been sufficient to support the tremendous effort and expense needed to produce the type of journalism on which the company was founded
All stories published prior to the closing down were returned, but with a link to the owner's statement http://assets.dnainfo.com/message.html In short, it's all about forcing someone's hand and attempting to corner them into making a decision. It's not so much a business opportunity, but an old-fashioned shakedown.
Isn't Sky News really just a vanity channel from a business perspective as it loses money. Perhaps the most they could expect is to sell their production facilities, or rent them to a contractor to provide a 24 hour news service.
However, I couldn't imagine that paying someone else (for example ITN) to produce the service would be any cheaper than doing it themselves.
Is it not possible for a company like Virgin or ITV to buy the news operations from Sky? Would ITV then ditch ITN? They could always have another go.
And would it be possible to say, for Sky to buy the operations back in a decade or so? after they have done the deal of course.
I wouldn't like to see Sky news close, but I don't want the deal to happen. SO perhaps it is better that it is sold. The channel would lose the stigma if one ever existed.
Isn't Sky News really just a vanity channel from a business perspective as it loses money. Perhaps the most they could expect is to sell their production facilities, or rent them to a contractor to provide a 24 hour news service.
However, I couldn't imagine that paying someone else (for example ITN) to produce the service would be any cheaper than doing it themselves.
But didn’t Sky News actually made a profit around 2001, as was reported on the channel itself, something which changed after they started to tinker with the winning formula and also had to deal with the increased cross promotion that the BBC News 24 started to receive around that time from other BBC channels, which they then started to lose out to BBC News 24.
Is it not possible for a company like Virgin or ITV to buy the news operations from Sky?
It would be possible for anyone to buy it. I can't see why either ITV or Virgin Media would want to. The former isn't really into news and the latter sold off their content business years ago.
If it ever did get sold I can only see another news broadcaster buying it to try and grab a big foothold in the UK