Seven buys SCA TV licences after ADH deal falls through
Seven West Media has entered a binding agreement to buy Southern Cross Austereo’s regional TV licenses after a previously announced deal with Australian Digital Holdings fell through.
Seven and SCA both made ASX announcements on the binding sale Tuesday morning. Seven will pay $3.75 million upfront for the licenses in Tasmania, Spencer Gulf, Broken Hill, Mt Isa, Darwin, and Remote, Central and Eastern Australia
“The final conditions to complete this transaction were not satisfied and all further negotiations and discussions with ADH have now ceased,” SCA said in their announcement.
The $3.75m matches the cash price ADH had agreed to pay in February, however ADH also had a top-up $3.6m in fees for ongoing services, for an announced total deal value of $6.35m. At the time, ADH said to Mumbrella that the prices was “indicative of the fact that there’s a lot of work to do.”
ADH is a right-wing digital-only news publisher, founded by Jack Bulfin in 2021 with the backing of Alan Jones and other conservatives. Its core product is the streaming ADH TV, and it has intentions to launch the US brand Newsmax into the Australian market.
SCA said in its release it would use the proceeds of the sale to pay down debt.
“The completion of this sale to SWM will result in SCA being fully divested of all television assets, which aligns with its All About Audio strategy,” the release stated.
Seven pointed out that the licensed regions currently take the Seven Network signal under affiliate deals.
“The acquisition largely completes SWM’s national broadcast network and opens new markets to Seven where the powerful offering of digital television – both live and VOD – on 7plus complements the Seven broadcast signal,” the Seven release stated.
The deal is expected to close 30 June.
After ADH and SCA announced their now-defunct deal in February, ADH’s Jason Morrison told Mumbrella the costs of the regional TV stations’ affiliate deals with Seven was “significant”, and ADH was “looking hard at that”. Morrison said ADH had plans to revitalise local content in the regions, referencing local TV news in the South Australia’s Spencer Gulf.
They can and should physically drop the Southern Cross from Austereo now.
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