STARZ signals interest in A+E Global Media
STARZ signals interest in A+E Global Media
STARZ CEO Jeff Hirsch said the company was on the lookout for M&A opportunities in his recent earnings call with analysts.
STARZ CEO Jeff Hirsch said the company was watching for potential acquisition opportunities last week, and he apparently was quite serious. Hirsch apparently has an interest in acquiring A+E Global Media, the joint venture between Disney and Hearst Communications that houses cable networks like A&E, History Channel, Lifetime, and others.
Key Details:
- We’ll take them: STARZ has officially registered its interest in acquiring A+E Global Networks.
- No sale yet: A+E is holding out for better offers, according to a report.
- Going digital: STARZ would likely transform these cable channels into digital brands, perhaps to help launch an ad-supported streaming platform.
Per Lucas Shaw of Bloomberg, STARZ has “raised its hand” as a company that has interest in acquiring A+E Global Networks. He says that talks haven’t progressed far, as A+E wants a deeper-pocketed firm to enter the discussion as well.
Disney and Hearst enlisted Wells Fargo to help facilitate a potential sale of A+E Global Networks over the summer, and have been awaiting bids since. There’s still no guarantee a sale is carried out at all, but now that there’s one publicly interested party, there will probably be more.
Hirsch laid out a potential vision for A+E Global Networks should STARZ end up acquiring them during his earnings conference call on Thursday. The CEO said that STARZ wants to diversify to ad-supported streaming channels, but its content library is too adult and small to support a large inventory of such channels.
Acquiring “marooned linear networks” is one way to diversify the STARZ library, and doing so means they can then be shifted to the digital space, Hirsch explained. He once again mentioned the STARZ tech platform as a vehicle for “[repositioning] those brands into the digital world.”
Shaw points out that there may not be a large selection of other companies lining up to buy A+E Global Networks any time soon, but Disney and Hearst have plenty of strategic options available to them. STARZ has an interesting strategy in the works of its own to secure its future through ad-supported streaming, if it can start to acquire brands like A+E Global Networks.
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