Report: Comcast Still Looking to Offer New Fox Bid

The Walt Disney Co. and 21st Century Fox have announced that they would hold shareholder meetings in New York on July 27 to approve Disney’s latest $71 billion offer for Fox’s Hollywood studios, cable channels, content library, international channels, and parts of the European Sky satellite-television business.

This came only days after the Justice Department’s antitrust regulators disclosed a lightning-fast approval for a Disney-Fox deal as long as Disney sells off Fox’s 22 regional sports networks.

According to philly.com, Comcast would have to make a competing bid before July 27 so Fox shareholders can consider it.

“We’re still in the middle of the game,” Eric Schiffer, chairman of the private equity firm Patriarch Organization in Los Angeles, said on Friday morning, echoing the belief that Comcast will not hang its head and walk away.

Comcast is reportedly negotiating with private equity firms as partners for a new Fox bid that could top $80 billion, with the outside firms defraying some of the massive borrowing that Comcast would take on to close a Fox deal.

“Comcast will dig in because they see this as a historic moment to strike,” Schiffer said. But Disney “won’t back away. It will fight this to the end. And at some point this will be difficult for Comcast financially.”

The ultimate price could go to $90 billion, observers believe.

Disney, led by CEO Bob Iger, would like the Fox movie- and TV-production studios to fill its pipeline of entertainment for direct-to-consumer streaming services to compete with Netflix and Amazon. Comcast, run by CEO Brian Roberts, likes the Fox entertainment studios but has said that he would like to take its business global. Sky and Fox’s international channels that reach hundreds of millions of TV viewers would enable Comcast/NBCUniversal to do that.