News Corp considers selling Australia pay TV and streaming unit

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp said it may sell Australian cable TV and streaming unit Foxtel after receiving an approach, a deal that would end its involvement in a high-overhead asset that has struggled to adapt to the Netflix era.

News Corp said it was considering the deal in a trading update in which the division posted a 5% profit decline for the June quarter. Overall profit at News Corp, which split from Murdoch's Fox Corp in 2013, rose 11% in the period, led by its real estate listings business.

A review of the News Corp business units had "coincided recently with third-party interest in a potential transaction involving the Foxtel", CEO Robert Thomson said in a statement.

"We are evaluating options ... with our advisors in light of that external interest."

A sale of Foxtel would relieve News Corp, which holds most of the Murdoch family's print mastheads like the Wall Street Journal and book publisher HarperCollins, of a business that looms large on the Australian media landscape but has faced disruption from cheap, narrow-margin streaming rivals.

With its physical set-top boxes installed alongside people's televisions, Foxtel once dominated Australian pay TV but it has shed subscribers who pay about 100 Australian dollars ($66) a month for that service since Netflix, Disney and Amazon began rushing out streaming offers for a fraction of the price.

Foxtel, of which dominant Australian telco Telstra owns 35%, started its own streaming service in 2020, alongside the set-top boxes. That has offset a decline in higher-paying traditional subscriber numbers but not in subscriber revenue, which was up 1% in the June quarter.

Still, News Corp's Australia-listed shares jumped 8% by mid-session as investors cheered a