News Corp and Telstra Sell Foxtel to DAZN for $2.1 Billion
American media company News Corp and Australian telecommunications company Telstra have reached an agreement to sell their Australian pay-TV and streaming service Foxtel to British sports platform DAZN. The valuation of the struggling channel is $2.1 billion, including $578 million in debt to former shareholders, which will be fully repaid as part of the operation. Foxtel has weighed heavily on News Corp's profits for years, with a significant decline in subscribers due to competition from Netflix.
Under the terms of the agreement, News Corp will hold a 6% stake in DAZN with a seat on the board of directors, and Telstra will hold 3% of the global streaming platform based in London, founded in 2016. The operation is expected to be one of the few major consolidation transactions in the sector in the coming months. The acquisition will allow DAZN to penetrate an important market, as Australians watch more sports than any other country in the world. This is a step in the long-term strategy to transform the platform into a global sports hub.
In light of these developments, the outlook for audiovisual media in Tunisia appears bleak. We are still in the prehistoric era. We only have a culture of subscription in the context of pirated services. The advertising market is narrow, and non-conventional channels are taking over; the content offered by the few channels that manage to resist is rarely interesting. The channels are not structured and live from day to day. In such an approach, they will never be able to be part of an expansion project. There is nothing to valorize.
Worse still, those who turn to YouTube to create channels are unable to generate significant revenue, as the click-through rate on Google's platform in Tunisia yields almost nothing. The industry is agonizing, despite having skills in all areas. It's time to think about the future, because in ten years, no one will be watching local TV.
