Liberty still mulling regional Fox offer

Braves owner Liberty Media continues to look, albeit cautiously, at a possible purchase of the Fox regional sports networks, including Atlanta-based Fox Sports South and Fox Sports Southeast.

“It’s a set of assets we know well,” Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei said on a conference call Thursday. “We understand both their strengths and their weaknesses, which are manifest.

“It would be logical that we would look at it. But we’re going to look at it only on the basis that it’s attractive for us for the long term and that we can see reasonable upside, given what our clear risks in the distribution of these (networks would be) in the changing (distribution) world.”

The future of Fox’s 22 regional sports networks, known as RSNs, has been up in the air since last summer, when 20th Century Fox reached a $71 billion agreement to sell most of its entertainment assets, including the RSNs, to Disney. That deal is expected to close soon. As a condition of approval, the U.S. Justice Department is requiring Disney, which already owns ESPN, to sell off the regional sports networks that are part of the Fox deal.

That’s where Liberty Media might come into the picture.

“We are approaching them with an appropriate caution and appropriate wide-eyed certainty and understanding that we formed a lot of these things with Fox a long time ago,” Maffei said. “We have a lot of history with them and understand those businesses well.”