In which the three shells trick will be performed by the bromancer, the onion muncher and Dame Groan ...

 

The pond can't say it doesn't mean to harp on it, because it does mean to harp, endlessly, joyously on it.

Christopher Warren was on hand in Crikey yesterday to help with the harping ... For sale: Murdoch’s grand dream, barely used. Available by subscription only, News Corp's sale of Foxtel represents the dying embers of Rupert Murdoch's grand plan for a global television subscription network. (paywall)

It’s official: News Corp’s Foxtel is on the market. The bargain basement sale of Australia’s declining pay-TV monopoliser and struggling streamer sounds the last post on the most ambitious play by Rupert Murdoch.
Once central to the Murdoch dream, Foxtel now no longer fits. It’s just the last piece left over from Rupert’s grand 1990s vision to build a global television subscription network, dominating the supply chain from content creation to distribution, burrowing into your eyeballs through your wallet.
It’s unlikely Foxtel will long outlast the sell-off, with the rumoured private equity buyer expected to do what private equity does: strip it for parts. Sell what it can. Milk dry what it can’t sell. Close what it can’t milk.
Just 20 years ago, Murdoch’s global vision seemed within his capacious grasp. In Australia, Foxtel had beaten competitors to be the sole distributor at scale, with control of key sports rights (and joint ownership of the National Rugby League) essential to building audiences. He’d also secured a long-term lease to build a major production studio at Sydney’s Moore Park. 
The Australian operation matched a controlling (albeit minority) stake in Britain’s BSkyB and interests in Germany and Italy. In Hong Kong, James, then the favourite son, was leading the drive to build the Asian link with the Star Television Network in eastern and southern Asia including — most audaciously — into China.
In 2003, Murdoch’s world network seemed to be coming together as he captured a controlling stake in the major missing piece: the largest US satellite distributor, DirectTV. It was an intoxicating moment, but no sooner were all the pieces laid out on the table than it began to fall apart.

Amid the gloating, there's one item that still sticks in the craw - the way that the Emeritus Chairman and his minions conspired with the onion muncher and his lackeys (Malware following orders) to ruin the NBN...

...Foxtel struggled with high costs, rapidly evolving technology and low market penetration, peaking at about 30% of households (compared to more than 80% in the US and UK). Despite the company’s political clout, it could never convince either Labor or Liberal governments to waive the anti-siphoning laws that protected free-to-air broadcasters’ priority access to sporting rights.

Faced with the innovator’s dilemma, News Corp retreated to its core competency of regulation manipulation, with a long campaign to block or neuter the National Broadband Network. As technology continued to disrupt the sector, neither the Murdochs nor News Corp’s Australian management ever quite knew what to do with Foxtel, one moment zigging to bigging it up, the next zagging to freezing it out.

But revenge is sweet ...

...The company then turned to consolidation. The Murdochs bought back the share of the business that Rupert had gifted to Kerry Packer as part of the settlement of the Super League wars. Ownership of Australia’s Sky News was swapped from Britain’s BSkyB and its Australian partners to News Corp Australia. Program production and distribution were merged into a new Foxtel company, two-thirds owned by the Murdochs (and consolidated into News Corp accounts) and one-third by Telstra.

News Corp played with floating Foxtel — with the hope that a recapitalisation would pay off the debts Foxtel owes to both News Corp and Telstra (including the capitalisation of unpaid services the two owners had contributed to the platform).

Too late; Foxtel pivoted to streaming, trying various iterations that have all struggled. Most global suppliers can’t be bothered releasing Australian figures, but Binge seems to sit in fourth or fifth place behind Netflix, Stan, Disney and, perhaps, Prime and Paramount+. It faces losing its most valuable product when HBO launches its own expected streamer next year.

The sports streamer, Kayo, dominates Australia’s key sports — cricket, rugby league and AFL — but sports rights are a margins business, with competition from other streamers (and from Nine) threatening to squeeze those margins as costs rise.

According to the AFR, the company is hoping to clear about $1 billion from the sale and recoup the money Foxtel owes it. Worth it to quietly bury a failed dream.

Speaking of failed dreams and failed dreamers, there was plenty of that this day on the front page of the lizard Oz ...

Eek, the Orbán-loving onion muncher is back for a birthday bash ... but then Lloydie of the Amazon hasn't scribbled since 18th July so it was way past time for a bit of climate science denialism.

But first to the bro, because if you've got the onion muncher, first you must have the bromancer to deliver the fragrant bromance, still going strong ...

Both these fine Brexiteers and Thatcherites managed to propose that little England be reduced to a land of excrement, in a way that made the reviled Seine look like drinking water ...

Remember the bro in his hey day?

But the pond isn't here to relive the grand old days. 

The bromancer's mission, should he chose to accept it, is to blather on about the recent UK riots without mentioning the far right, or key muck rakers and rabble rousers who played a part in the proceedings...

Of course he accepted, and did it in a doddle ...

Off to a fine start ... and with plenty of illustrative snaps of irrelevant clowns of the Big Dave and Margie kind ...

No need for snaps of any of this mob to intrude ...

And don't be afraid of clichés, when you're the bromancer, they're your friend ...

Yep, it takes singular skill to unfairly single out the Muslins, without once mentioning the sort who are really doing the dog-whistling singling ...

Can the bromancer get by without mentioning the likes of Andrew Tate or Tommy Robinson? Can he what? 

How wrong of you to doubt his incredible skills and capacity for misleading distractions ...

What of the talk of civil war? Nope, it's all about getting dewy-eyed about Margie, while the fiendish Bond villain is obscured from view ...

In time the real cause - identity politics - will be revealed ... and the bromancer can have yet another go at the Voice, while managing to confuse and conflate left and right ...

Quick, before you start to take the bromancer seriously, have a serve of England riots: how has 'two-tier policing' myth become widespread?

Follow it up with a serve of Bond supervillain Elon Musk calls PM 'two-tier Keir' over police response to UK riots.

Then you might dip into 'Two-tier': UK treats far-right attacks less hardly than Islamist violence, says thinktank ... or perhaps Priti Patel's 'laughable 'claims of two-tier policing putting officers at risks.

The pond can't guarantee these antidotes will work, but you need to swallow something if you're going to be able to swallow a far-right loon scribbling about everything except the far right loons who took to the streets to riot, while ignoring all those in England who took to the streets to protest at the behaviour of the far right goons ...

Why that's totally worthy of George Orwell ... roll it around on the tongue: "without authority there is no freedumb." 

Up there with “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

And so to the onion muncher, because once you've had the bro, you must have the object of the bromance, and a serve of climate science denialism ...

It says a lot about the aging and deeply irrelevant onion muncher that he's still on his climate science denialist, gas and coal loving jag ...

Once the snaps and the birthday party are out of the way, it'll be time for the denialism to surface ...

What joy that the onion muncher has been relieved of his duties as lickspittle lackey of Orbán so he could trot out a standard serve of denialism, with a tip of the hat about furrin students that presages this day's Groaning ...

This is what happens when the Riddster and Lloydie of the Amazon go quiet and the reptiles can only turn to the onion muncher ... coal, coal, coal all the way, with a little bit of gas, and yes, he's still spewing, upchucking if you will, talk about "the climate cult" ...

Fucked the NBN, and now still busy diligently fucking the planet ...

And so to Dame Groan and the usual Tuesday groaning ... and taking her cue from the onion muncher, this week it's education and those damn furriners yet again...

It has the familiarity of a nightmare, or a fever dream ...

The pond is no psychologist and so is in no position to provide an explanation of what seems like a deeply Freudian fear of pesky, difficult furriners ... a fear that haunts Dame Groan week in, week out ...

Best just to note the snaps and the video distraction...

... and then sit on the couch, taking notes, as Dame Groan stares wild-eyed into space, groaning away, with the occasional deep sigh, as the fever dream continues ...

The pond has mentioned before how all those students press down on Dame Groan like the playing cards that assault Alice in Alice in Wonderland ...

A bigger tragedy is the way that Dame Groan's obsessions prevent her from giving comrade Bill a bagging on a matter he really should be bagged about ...

Dame Groan doesn't care about any of that ... she's still haunted by those bloody furriners ...

That means it's left to the likes of the infallible Pope to raise other matters which might deserve some attention ...

And so to the final gobbet of the fever dream, sweat forming on the brow as Dame Groan groans away at the keyboard ...

The pond gets it ... everything is the fault of those bloody furriners, ruining everything ... seriously ...and with that thought in mind, it's time to close with an immortal Rowe offering, seriously, you can bet on that ...