Anthem Sports & Entertainment, the parent company of IMPACT Wrestling, acquired a majority interest in AXS TV and HDNet Movies earlier this week.
Anthem Sports and Entertainment Leonard Asper spoke to Multi-Channel News about his company’s purchase and the reason behind the purchase. It all comes down to scaling the company and growing outside of the United States.
“We’ve been looking for an acquisition for some time to grow and get scale, and do what everybody else in the media business is doing,” Asper said. “We looked for things that serve passionate communities, can transform to digital media companies and have no geographical limitations on them.”
“We were talking about a content relationship with them based on some of the other things we do — wrestling and e-sports and fantasy sports — and that led to this deal,” Asper said. “There was no investment bank hired or a process at all. This was a discussion that came out of a relationship we were developing with them.”
Asper says the large video catalog the company has played a major role in them buying IMPACT back in 2017. Many believe that IMPACT will start to air on AXS TV as part of this deal.
“That’s a very important part of our growth plan, owning content. We believe owning the content and putting it on our channels, but also having it on other people’s platforms as well. I call that untethered vertical integration.”
