Liberty Media chief John Malone looks as if he wants to snatch his cable crown back from Comcast’s Brian Roberts.
Malone’s plans to spin off Liberty’s cable broadband holdings into a separate public company, not merely a tracking stock, has set off speculation that he’s seeking to emulate Roberts’ empire building.
The tip-off came earlier this month when Malone shelved plans to issue a tracking stock to spin off Liberty’s 26.4 percent stake in Charter, the fourth-largest cable company, according to National Alliance Securities’ analyst Robert Routh.
That the tracking stock is being replaced with an asset-backed security has Routh thinking the spun-off entity — to be named Liberty Broadband Group — can conveniently merge with Charter itself.
That’s when the fun would begin. A Liberty-controlled Charter could set about replicating Roberts’ success with his Comcast-NBCU combination, Routh said, by checking any interest that Fox Broadcasting, Time Warner or Viacom might have in reprising the role of NBCU.
While another media monolith modeled after Comcast-NBCU may seem a long shot, several extenuating circumstances warrant notice.
Malone’s rich history of deals with Fox Broadcasting’s Rupert Murdoch could easily give rise to another, while a magazine-free Time Warner makes its remaining content even more appealing to a distributor like Charter. There’s also the unprecedented interest in estate planning displayed by Viacom’s Redstone during this month of his 91st birthday. (Murdoch is the chairman of 21st Century Fox and News Corp., the parent of The Post.)
Roberts first engineered Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal through a gradual takeover completed early last year. He next set his sights on Time Warner Cable by submitting a winning $45 billion bid he’s currently trying to push past regulators.
Roberts has stayed true to the bigger-is-better ethos that governed media M&A the previous decade whereas his fellow media moguls were dismantling.
Sumner Redstone pulled CBS out of Viacom in 2006, keeping control of both. Time Warner spun out its Time Warner Cable operations three years later and will continue to spin by uncoupling its magazine division next month. Even Malone, the master deal maker at Liberty Media, saw fit to sever his company’s Starz premium movie channels in 2013.