Edmund Lee

The Walt Disney Company sharply increased its offer for 21st Century Fox June 20, as it looks to win a bidding war with Comcast for Rupert Murdoch’s entertainment conglomerate. In a quickly issued statement agreeing to the sweetened deal, 21st Century Fox said that the revamped offer from Disney, now valued at $71.3 billion, was “superior to the proposal” made by Comcast last week. The bid by Disney is 35 percent higher than its earlier offer and about $6 billion more than Comcast’s. Disney’s chief executive, Robert A.

The Walt Disney Company has agreed to buy most of 21st Century Fox’s assets in a deal worth $52.4 billion, but things got complicated recently when Comcast made a rival offer that valued the business at $65 billion. It may stoke visions of blistering negotiations between high-powered media executives with big egos barking into phones or ruminating in closed-door meetings, but there are rules of engagement around mergers that are designed to civilize the process.

A Q&A with John Stankey, the new AT&T executive in charge of new Time Warner properties. 

AT&T announced it had completed its $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner. The Justice Department still has 60 days from the date of the ruling to file an appeal, even if the companies close the merger, and such a filing remained a possibility. There was a time limit on when the government could seek an injunction, because the merger agreement between the companies expires on June 21. If an injunction had been granted, the companies would have had to extend the date or AT&T would have had to pay Time Warner $500 million in what is known as a reverse termination fee.

A Q&A with AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. 

Comcast plans to outbid Disney for Fox’s movie and TV studios, its cable networks and its stake in Hulu, as Comcast announced today it’s in “advanced stages of preparing an offer.” Murdoch, who heads Fox, already turned down a proposal from Comcast late last year in favor of Disney, despite Comcast’s bid that was 16 percent higher.  Now that it’s out in the open, a bidding war is sure to ensue, and Comcast and Disney will offer their respective spins. Here’s what to expect:

AT&T and Time Warner plan to merge in a $85 billion deal that would unite one of the largest distributors of content with one of the biggest producers of content, a roster that includes hits like HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” the Harry Potter films and major cable franchises like CNN. But not if the Justice Department has its way. The U.S. government has sued to block the deal, a move that some fret is actually political reprisal for CNN’s reporting on President Trump. The trial begins on Wednesday, March 21. 

AT&T wants to buy Time Warner, and Wall Street, predictably, obliged, sending Time Warner shares up and AT&T stock down. Too bad the deal doesn’t make much sense. (Similarly, it doesn’t make sense for Apple to own Time Warner, either, which we’ll get to further down.) Here’s why: A company that owns pipes, whether over the air or through the ground, doesn’t actually benefit from owning the content flowing through those pipes.

Time Warner, which owns HBO, CNN, Warner Bros. and a lot of sports rights via Turner, loses its value if it can’t sell its content to every possible distributor, including AT&T’s main rivals, such as Comcast and Verizon. AT&T knows this (or should), but since the company’s been saddled with a price war (thanks to T-Mobile and Sprint), it’s been looking for new ways to increase growth. As part of that effort, it completed its $49 billion acquisition of DirecTV in 2015, a deal that actually makes sense since it allows AT&T to upsell both services to the respective customers, as well as potentially making both stickier. Even then, fewer people today are buying TV subscriptions from satellite providers (long known as the cheaper option to cable), since they can now get a lot from Netflix and Hulu and Amazon.

The Forbes family, an emblem of American wealth and pioneer of business journalism, is giving up control over the media empire it cultivated for almost a century by selling a majority stake to a Hong Kong-based group.

The transaction valued Forbes Media at $475 million, said a person with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the terms are private. The agreement will hand over Forbes magazine and its widely followed ranking of the world’s richest people to a collection of investors led by Integrated Asset Management (Asia), founded by investor Tak Cheung Yam, Forbes said.

Apparently, the Justice Department has reached out to Walt Disney, Discovery Communications and CBS as it investigates whether the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger is anticompetitive.

While none of the companies has publicly opposed the acquisition, some have said they want the US to ensure that Comcast won’t favor its own programming over their content if the merger is approved. Other media companies have also been approached. Among other issues, the antitrust division is asking about most-favored-nation clauses.

The contracts are used by Comcast and other pay-TV providers to ensure competitors can’t get better content-licensing deals with programmers.