That’s the rumor of the week it seems, at least via the New York Post. Is Verizon about to take a swing at owning even more content? Analysts appear to be rather tickled by the idea, but otherwise not particularly impressed.
With AT&T still in the process of buying Time Warner, the theory goes that Verizon needs more actual content to synergize with its advertising capabilities. Verizon, of course, recently closed its purchase of Yahoo! which it added to AOL in the company’s own effort to diversify.
The story apparently derives from a ‘well placed banker’, which probably translates to ‘investment banker who would really love to make this deal happen, please call’. It’s hard to envision Verizon owning Disneyworld, let alone coming up with the $200B or so it would take to make such a deal happen. And yet in 2017 one can’t quite write it off completely. Far stranger things have happened in the past year.
That being said, one deal that did close recently was Consolidated’s purchase of Fairpoint. The deal gives Consolidated the ILEC position in northern New England and a few other places, but also brings a substantial amount of fiber under its umbrella. Consolidated now boasts 36,000 route miles of fiber connecting 8,800 on-net buildings and 2,600 on-net towers. What they do with those assets will be worth watching.
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Categories: ILECs, PTTs · Mergers and Acquisitions
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Verizon could be looking at some specific assets. They probably wouldn’t mind taking down something like ESPN, which if I remember correctly has been dropping in viewership, making Disney more likely to come to the table.