The night sky has gone dark because Byron Allen has sold his stake in the Starz. Allen, the longtime host of the toothless late-night comedy show Comics Unleashed, went on a media shopping spree earlier this year, buying a controlling stake in BuzzFeed and Stephen Colbert’s late-night timeslot in a time-buy agreement with CBS. Today, he’s begun offloading some of those purchases. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Allen sold his 10.7% stake in the premium cable outfit, piecemeal through August and September for a little under $45 million.
The news is a distinct change of plans for the man best known for asking comics the set-ups to pre-written jokes. In March, he attempted a hostile takeover of Starz, buying 1.8 million shares from former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin (‘memba him?!) and becoming the cable channel’s second-biggest stockholder. Fearing the owner of the Weather Channel would soon own Starz, too, network executives adopted a poison pill that allowed shareholders to buy stock at a 50% discount if any person or group acquired a 17.5% ownership stake. Allen was undeterred.
“It doesn’t matter. When I decide to buy the whole company—I will buy the whole company—I do plan on controlling Starz,” he said at the time. “I want two streaming platforms. One that’s SVOD, and one that’s AVOD. I’m the largest in what I believe is an AVOD platform, free streaming. That would be BuzzFeed and HuffPost. And I want an SVOD, so that’s Starz. I’m going to do whatever I need to do to control Starz.” Unless part of his strategy is to sell all his stock and lure them into a false sense of security before unleashing his full purchasing power, we imagine that plan has changed.
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