The $ky’s the limit

Comcast, Fox raise bids for Euro pay-TV provider

Comcast on Wednesday afternoon regained the lead in the bidding war for Sky by bumping its bid for Europe’s largest pay-TV provider to $34 billion.

The increased offer came just hours after Twenty-First Century Fox, which already owns 39 percent of Sky, raised its offer for the rest of the company to $18.54 per share, a total value of $32.5 billion.

The high-stakes face-off between the media giants is very likely to reconfigure the global media landscape.

While the future of Sky is at hand, Fox, in a separate deal, has reached an agreement to sell most of its media assets to Disney for $71 billion.

Comcast is trying to upset that arrangement as well. The Philadelphiabased company has made an all-cash bid of $65 billion for the Fox assets that include the Twentieth-Century Fox movie studio, its TV-production assets, its regional sports networks, entertainment cable stations and Sky.

Fox’s sweetened Sky bid, disclosed earlier Wednesday, totaled 5 percent more than the $31 billion Comcast initially bid on April 25 for the London-based media company.

That Comcast bid was a 30 per- cent increase over Fox’s initial Sky offer — made in December 2016.

Media watchers are wondering whether Comcast will continue its quest for Fox or choose to drop out of that bidding contest to focus all its energy, and cash, on Sky.

They also wonder if Fox and Disney — individually or together — will again raise the offer for Sky.

In some sense, the Fox and Sky bidding wars are connected. As Comcast and Disney increase their bids for the Fox assets, the value of Sky rises — and could necessitate higher bids for the remaining 69 percent of the satellite-TV giant.

Fox and Sky are prized by Disney and Comcast for the same reasons.

Fox owns such international powerhouses as Star India and National Geographic Partners, while an acquisition of Sky would deliver a beachhead of 22.5 million paying customers in Austria, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the UK.

In addition to its global footprint, Disney wants Fox for the movies and TV shows it can contribute to the two direct-to-consumer offerings Disney plans to launch.

Comcast, with little overseas presence, covets the global reach of Sky and that content.