Media giant Disney is acquiring Star India from 21st Century Fox as part of a global $52.4 billion mega-deal announced Thursday.
Disney's footprint will expand significantly in India - one of the fastest growing and largest media markets in the world - with Star TV.
Disney, which runs a Disney channel and Hungama in India, already owns UTV.
Under the deal, Disney will acquire most of the Fox properties, especially in entertainment, while Fox will retain mostly news channels in the US.
As part of the $52.4 billion deal, Disney will distribute its programming on Star India, which is an operator of 69 TV channels in eight languages in India. It also runs popular Hotstar streaming service. Disney also would gain global rights to professional cricket.
This Disney deal with Twenty-First Century Fox Inc gives the world’s best-known entertainment company new advantages in India, according to a Reuters report. Disney will now have advantages in the form of cricket rights and local-language TV shows for India, which is seen as a fast-growing media market.
The sale was part of a reordering of the assets of the Murdoch family with an aging 86-year-old patriarch, Rupert Murdoch.
The gigantic group, once known as News Corporation, underwent another wrenching change in 2012 when the TV and entertainment assets were split away from newspaper and non-TV news media, creating 21st Fox for the entertainment operations and NewsCorp for the news side.
The split came about as a result of an outcry over a phone-hacking scandal in Britain involving one of the Murdoch-owned tabloids.
Now the media conglomerate is downsizing and going back to its roots in the news business.
For now, Murdoch will continue to be a big presence in the US media world with Fox News and Fox TV stations around the country and NewsCorp, which owns The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, which have operations around the world.
With IANS inputs