Weekly Rewind
Fox in the House of Mouse: In a $52 billion deal, Disney plans to buy most of 21st Century Fox. That includes Fox’s movie and TV studios, FX and National Geographic networks, Fox’s regional sports networks, and access to slew of entertainment franchises such as the X-Men, Avatar, and The Simpsons. It also includes Fox’s stake in Hulu, which would give Disney majority ownership of the streaming service. Excluded from the deal are the FS1 cable network and Fox’s broadcast and news channels, which would be spun off in to a separate company.
I’ll likely have more to say about this in next week’s column, but Disney CEO Bob Iger has already been talking up the implications for cord-cutters. He sees Hulu as becoming a stronger competitor to services like Netflix with a focus on more adult-oriented programming, while Fox’s more family-friendly fare would wind up in Disney’s standalone streaming service. He also floated the idea of bundling those services together with ESPN’s future streaming service, and he cast the entire deal as a hedge against collapsing cable bundles. Take it all with a grain of salt, though; executives need to paint these kinds of mega-mergers as pro-consumer to pass regulatory muster.
Amazon and Google on the mend? Although I painted a bleak picture of the relationship between Amazon and Google in last week’s column, it seems the two companies are already working out their differences. On Thursday, Google’s Chromecast reappeared on Amazon’s website, two years after Amazon stopped selling them. A Google spokesperson told The Verge that the companies are in “productive discussions” about “an agreement for the benefit of our mutual customers.”
They’ve got a lot sort through. Beyond just booting Chromecast from its store, Amazon also doesn’t sell Google’s Home speakers, and doesn’t offer Amazon Prime video support on Chromecast. Google retaliated last week by blocking YouTube from Amazon’s Fire TV (starting January 1) and Echo Show (effective immediately). On a deeper level, the two companies have become such fierce competitors in so many different areas that they’re incentivized to sabotage one another’s ecosystems. Chromecast’s arrival on Amazon.com is at least a sign that they’re figuring out how to put customers first instead.
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