Disney bought a 15% stake in the BAMTech streaming company
The Disney giant continues to expand in the global media market and take over media companies. The corporation bought a 15% stake in the streaming company BAMTech from Major League Baseball (MLB). The cost of the deal was $900 million. This allowed Disney to get a 100% stake in the company and thereby gain full control over it. Prior to that, BAMTech owned 85% of the corporation, and 15% remained with MLB.
Disney turned its attention to BAMTech in 2016. At that time, the corporation began to buy the company piecemeal. First, the media giant bought 33% of BAMTech for $1 billion. The goal of the deal was to sell as much content as possible directly to consumers. Disney’s interest in BAMTech was due to changing consumer preferences: more and more viewers began to switch from cable television to streaming platforms. Due to this, the media giant was rapidly losing ground in the cable television sphere. The way out was the acquisition of new companies, which was one of the ways to diversify content. Special attention was paid to the preferences of young viewers.
The complete takeover of BAMTech has helped Disney put its plan into action. The corporation now fully owns the leader in streaming sports programming, which provides its platform to Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment and HBO Warner Bros. Discovery Inc.
In turn, the former owner of BAMTech MLB will split the profits from the sale among all 30 of the league’s clubs – $30 million each. This solid investment will especially help the league’s poorest clubs. After all, the cost of maintaining the teams includes not only player salaries but also many other costs, including transportation and organizational costs.
MLB was once the first sports league to offer live streaming of games involving non-local teams. Also, the league signed a long-term contract, under the terms of which it can manage online content and streaming broadcasts of the National Hockey League (NHL), which also includes the broadcast of games, not local teams.
Disney also says that they intend to continue to develop in the field of multimedia services. The media giant already has full control of the service Hulu after the deal with Comcast Corp. Disney does not abandon its plans to become a leader in the international streaming video market, which has long been dominated by Netflix Inc.
Accordingly, we can conclude that this is not the last such Disney deal. The corporation will stop at nothing until it leads the streaming video market, leaving Netflix in second place.
