As you may know, Liberty Media owns large stakes in both SiriusXM and BN (as well as DirectTV). Yesterday, Liberty announced a move to gain complete control of SiriusXM, partly as a way of increasing Liberty’s stock value by acquiring SiriusXM’s debt for tax purposes. As an XM subscriber and B&N fan I was curious. A post on the deal I saw through CNBC has an interesting theory linking SiriusXM and the Nook line through Liberty:
"Why is Liberty so desperate to get Sirius? As I have said, it is the NOLS (NOTE: Sirius's Net Operating Losses - possible tax writeoffs) and the fact that Sirius is a winner. But something else came out of the conference call. A future goal Liberty has is to package the Nook and Sirius (among other things) together. As one analyst remarked, it could all be on the school tablets as part of Barnes & Noble's (BKS) new partnership with Microsoft (MSFT). In a recent article I mentioned that Sirius can also send video signals with their satellite spectrum. Since Liberty already owns around 17% of B&N, this would be doable with controlling interest in Sirius. Liberty management is very focused on the Sirius XM research going on at the Boca Raton Tech Center, and they are very impressed with the satellite based capabilities. "This is very attractive on every platform," said Maffei."
BN (and Nook) may become a much larger content player than I ever thought if Liberty has its way.
