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.
At that time Mediaworks owned Three, which included Newshub (formerly 3 News) and several big properties such as the Project NZ and Married At First Sight NZ. WBD reportedly paid around NZ$20m for the business, which was said to be loss-making. WBD cut costs as the market worsened, shutting The Project in 2023 and Newshub in 2024.
With the sale of the channels, it can erase those line items from its newly-created Global Linear Networks division.
The sale is also important for media generally in New Zealand.
Sky, already New Zealand’s biggest media company, is now positioned as a major player in FTA TV.
Sky had operated its Sky Open (formerly Prime) linear channel for years — in part to meet FTA contract requirements for sports deals — but Three is the second-most popular national channel.
The pay TV operator will now compete head-to-head for advertising with the government-owned commercial incumbent, TVNZ.
Correction: This article originally stated that WBD had completely exited the NZ TV market. As noted, it retains pay TV channels on Sky.
