Reliance is reportedly close to agreeing to buy Disney’s India operations as Mukesh Ambani’s oil telecom empire looks to expand its digital and television assets.
Disney values its India operations at about $10 billion, while Reliance pegs its assets at $7 billion to $8 billion, Bloomberg News reported on Monday. According to the report, a deal could be signed and announced as early as next month.
Reliance said in an earlier statement that the company is constantly evaluating properties for acquisition.
In 2019, Disney acquired 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets for $71.3 billion, a move that was significantly strengthened by the addition of Star India.
The deal was critical to Disney’s global streaming expansion, giving Disney broadcast and streaming rights to Indian Premier League cricket matches, a number of multilingual television channels, and an interest in a Bollywood film production company. At the time of acquisition, Star’s Hotstar had approximately 150 million monthly active users.
Hotstar dominated India’s video streaming world for several more quarters, but its popularity grew after Reliance-backed Viacom18 secured five-year rights to stream IPL cricket matches for about $3 billion, and the situation has since changed. became tapered. Disney paid $3 billion for the same five-year rights to air the content on television.
Reliance has poached a number of top leadership and engineering talent to strengthen JioCinema over the past year, bringing premium content from HBO and NBC to its on-demand streaming service.
Disney’s Hotstar, which lost around 20 million subscribers this year as consumers flocked to JioCinema to watch IPL matches, has turned to the ongoing Cricket World Cup in hopes of winning back customers. Streaming for free to mobile viewers. Earlier this month, the Disney Streamer app took back the global on-demand video streaming record from JioCinema when a cricket match drew 35 million concurrent viewers. During Sunday’s India vs. New Zealand match, concurrent viewership jumped to 43 million viewers, breaking its own record.
Source: techcrunch.com
