Hi everyone – a very quiet Friday for media deals today. Take care this weekend!
Interesting Deals, Stats, & Product Updates
Digestible Media
Film/TV/Video
- Mediaset, the Italian TV giant, is demanding Germany’s ProSiebenSat.1 commit to a plan to grow its core TV business at next week’s shareholder meeting. (Read more)
- ProSieben spent the last several years focused on developing its Nucom holdings in e-commerce and consumer apps. With a change in CEO in March after weak financial performance, the company stated a return to focusing on its core entertainment business.
- Mediaset, which has built just under a 25% stake in ProSieben, has become an outspoken critic of the company not acting aggressively enough.
- Here’s a blog post by one investor predicting Mediaset and KKR (the PE firm that co-owned Prosieben from 2006 to 2013 and just bought a 5% stake in it again) will team up to takeover Prosieben, and sell the Nucom division to Axel Springer (the German publishing conglomerate KKR just took private). There’s big question of whether German regulators would allow that though.
- Disney is including Hulu in its pitch to TV advertisers at the upfronts this year. It’s also touting a new ad platform Disney Hulu XP that allows brands to make one purchase of advertising across all of Disney’s digital properties. (Read more)
Publishing
- Bytedance is shutting down TopBuzz, the international version of its enormously popular Jinri Toutiao social news aggregation app in China. TopBuzz once reached 40M MAUs but faded over the last several years. (Read more)
Interactive Media
Gaming
- Play One Up raised $3.1 million in seed funds from Three Curve Capital. The Ohio-based startup enables gamers to make wagers on the outcomes of their games within Madden NFL, NBA2K, FIFA, Fortnite, etc. and takes a 15% fee. (Read more)
Communications
- Reliance Jio Platforms, India’s leading telecom (in which both Facebook and KKR made large investments last month), is selling a 1.85% stake to UAE sovereign fund Mubadala for $1.2 billion. (Read more)