Altitude Sports & Entertainment is interested in possibly partnering with Liberty Media Corp. should Liberty gain Fox Sports Net Rocky Mountain in an impending deal with News Corp.
“It’s a little too early to speculate on it. … We do have a good relationship with Liberty and would love to sit down with them and talk about working on some things,” said Jim Martin, chief executive of Altitude.
“We’d do that now with Fox if they were interested,” he said. “There are things we’d work on together to make things more efficient.”
Denver-based Altitude is the broadcast network for Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, Colorado Mammoth and Colorado Rapids games. Fox Sports is the network for the Colorado Rockies and Colorado Crush.
Liberty is poised to gain three regional Fox sports networks – in Denver, Seattle and Pittsburgh – in addition to satellite provider DirecTV, in exchange for Liberty’s 19 percent stake in News Corp., the company that controls DirecTV and Fox, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
To complete the swap tax-free, 5 percent of the assets going to Liberty must be operating businesses, the Journal said. News Corp. has a 38.6 percent investment stake in El Segundo, Calif.-based DirecTV, but directly operates the Fox networks.
Liberty and News Corp. officials wouldn’t comment on the possibility of regional sports being added to the long-anticipated DirecTV deal.
Altitude’s “good relationship” with Liberty and its chairman John Malone stems from a 2000 deal with the network’s owner, Kroenke Sports Enterprises, in which Malone sold Kroenke the Nuggets, Avalanche and the Pepsi Center for $404 million.
Liberty sold those assets to Kroenke four weeks after acquiring Ascent Entertainment Group, a Denver-based company, for $755 million. As part of the deal, Liberty maintained a 6.5 percent stake in each of the Nuggets, Avalanche and Pepsi Center.
Liberty kept Ascent’s On Command unit, which provides movies and broadband services to hotel rooms, but in March said it would put On Command Corp. up for sale.
Martin, who served as chief operating officer for Liberty in 1991, said he was surprised News Corp. might be letting go of some of its regional sports networks.
“Anything could happen in this industry,” he said. “I don’t know if you’d see a lot of change. Fox Sports has a great management team. They (Liberty) could just let them run it.”
Fox brings a strong brand name and a national slate of programming to its regional networks, which would be hard to replace, said Dave Smrek, principal of Adrenalin Inc., a Denver-based sports marketing agency.
But the idea of rolling Fox’s local sports network into one brand under the Altitude name might be beneficial to the bottom line.
“Generally, two sports networks in a town the size of Denver stretches thin advertising dollars and programming,” Smrek said.
However, merging the networks together would create programming conflicts as seasons tend to overlap, he said, suggesting that Altitude could be split into two networks.
“Somehow they need to figure it out,” he said. “It’s not a big enough marketplace to sustain two regional sports networks.”
Staff writer Kimberly S. Johnson can be reached at 303-954-1088 or kjohnson@denverpost.com.
