Comcast Outbids Fox With $40 Billion Offer For Sky In Auction (yahoo.com)

Comcast outbid Rupert Murdoch's Twenty-First Century Fox after offering $40 billion in an auction on Saturday. According to Yahoo Finance, "The U.S. cable giant bid $22.59 a share for control of London-listed Sky, bettering a $20.49 dollars-a-share offer by Fox, Britain's Takeover Panel said." From the report: Buying Sky will make Philadelphia-based Comcast, which owns the NBC network and Universal Pictures, the world's largest pay-TV operator with around 52 million customers. Chairman and chief executive Brian Roberts has had his eye on Sky as a way to help counter declines in subscribers for traditional cable TV in its core U.S. market as viewers switch to video-on-demand services like Netflix and Amazon. Comcast's knock-out offer thwarted Murdoch's long-held ambition to win control of Sky, and is also a setback for U.S. entertainment giant Walt Disney which would have likely been its ultimate owner. Disney agreed a separate $71 billion deal to buy most of Fox's film and TV assets, including its existing 39 percent stake in Sky, in June and would have taken full ownership after a successful Fox takeover.

Comments

Re:This is very bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Sky don't have a dominant position in the UK broadband market, they actually offer totally unlimited (no fair use caps) for £30 (US$40) a month for 80mbps FTTC broadband, including phone line and any extra fees. This is pretty standard pricing for a totally uncapped product in the UK.

I don't believe sky would have the leverage on the UK market to be able to gain anything through messing with net neutrality.

Re:Dear Britain...

[Mal-2]

The alternative appears to be Disney. Plain incompetence is preferable to malicious competence.