In the last few hours, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Lisa Nandy has said that she is “minded” to intervene on public interest grounds in the Paramount acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery (WBD). This is potentially a major hurdle in the deal which has been passed in the US.

But I wanted to write a little about another big deal that will have major ramifications in the UK market – the separation of Comcast into two parts, as well as the acquisition within one of those two parts, by Sky of ITV channels.

Comcast is the massive media company that owns a significant, and very profitable cable and wireless business in the US. It also owns NBCUniversal including the broadcast network NBC, the streamer Peacock, the film studio Universal and the Universal theme park business. It also owns Sky which itself is made up of Sky UK, Sky Ireland and Sky Italia – the German speaking service having previously been spun off to RTL.

The two companies will be Comcast which will hold onto the cable and wireless elements, and NBCUniversal which will include all those media and theme park businesses including Sky.

The various schools of thought suggest that a separated out Comcast might in the future merge with Charter, another cable operator. In the background, there is the concern that Elon Musk’s Starlink might become a really sizeable competitor in the broadband space.

But there’s no doubt that separating out NBCUniversal does put the company “into play.” While Universal is a very successful film studio, second only to Disney, with Minions and Chris Nolan movies amongst many others, the TV part of the business – NBC, Peacock and Sky – is just isn’t truly globally scaled. They’re really only in four countries properly, with SkyShowtime, a joint venture between Sky and Paramount, placing programming in dozens more European countries. But the WBD/Paramount deal potentially would see SkyShowtime end, since the focus would surely shift to an HBO Max/Paramount+ world. That would leave Sky quite vulnerable.

The obvious interested party might be Netflix. It obviously chose to pull out of an increased bid for WBD when Paramount raised its offer, and the Netflix share price dipped during that process, without getting back to where it was since. But this would get Netflix theme parks, a different big studio, and lots of different IP.

It would also gain a broadcast TV network in the US, and should the Sky/ITV deal go through, similar in the UK. While many are trying to get out of linear broadcasts, the fact is that sport still works well on them, and having a second window for streaming output might be useful for Netflix. So far, unlike just about all the other streamers, Netflix has not sold second window rights to any of its owned programming.

The Sky/ITV deal has plenty on its plate too. Not least the combined 70% market share of TV advertising that they would get if nothing was to change. Sky sells advertising for Channel 5 and Disney in the UK. You would imagine that they would need to give some of that up, letting someone like Channel 4 pick up those contracts.

The counter argument that a combined Sky/ITV would make is that the video advertising market in 2026 is much more than broadcast, and should include YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Suddenly that 70% would be a lot smaller.

I don’t think that’s an entirely unreasonable argument, but I’m not close enough to the TV advertising world to truly understand the nuances.

More complex is the news situation. ITN supplies ITV with its news, as well as having contracts for news provision with Channel 4 and Channel 5. ITV only owns 40% of ITN, with the remainder being owned by Daily Mail Group and Trust (20%), Thomson Reuters (20%) and Informa (20%).

Then there’s Sky News. When Comcast took over Sky in 2018, they committed to keeping Sky News going at its existing cost for 10 years, with inflationary increases in budgets. That 10 years expires soon, and Sky News is said to lose money. So there was already a question mark over what would happen in 2028.

If Sky completes on buying ITV, where does that leave news? You would anticipate the ITN and Sky News somehow merging. It’s also notable that Comcast previously scrapped the idea of creating a global news provider to be called NBC Sky World News. NBC News still exists separately. And it will definitely be worth seeing what happens with CNN as the Paramount/WBD deal goes through. CBS News and CNN seem set to merge, but there are ongoing questions about how those news outfits would be run, and political considerations that are said to be concerning many at CNN.

One way or another, we are going to see a reduction in global news providers as these deals go through. I’m also not sure that Netflix really wants to be in the news business.

I’m not sure where this leaves any of this, but we do live in interesting times…