Warner Bros Discovery out of FTA TV in NZ as it sells to Sky
Warner Bros Discovery has sold its NZ TV assets to pay TV operator Sky New Zealand for a nominal $1, exiting a market it entered five years ago with the purchase of Mediaworks’ TV business.
Sky New Zealand, a giant in the local media market, is a publicly traded pay TV company that has close to a million paying customers with annual revenue over half a billion Australian dollars. It has no corporate link to Australia’s Sky News Australia or Foxtel.
The sale includes free-to-air channel Three and its catchup service ThreeNow, along with the Eden, Rush and HGTV channels and half of Bravo (NBC Universal owns the other half). WBD retains a NZ presence with its pay TV channels — such Discovery Channel and Animal Planet — carried on Sky.
The move is significant in that it represents WBD’s repudiation of a FTA TV market it optimistically entered in 2020.
