The New Zealand media industry is up for grabs as its foreign owners gear up for the relaxation of laws in Australia.
From February, media owners will be allowed to operate in more than one medium (TV, radio or print) in the same region.
This is expected to
spark a shuffling of Australian assets, which will catch New Zealand media companies in its wake as so many firms here are owned by Australians.
Two of the biggest media players - Fairfax New Zealand, with half the country's newspapers, and CanWest MediaWorks, with half of free-to-air TV and commercial radio - both look attractive morsels for the media feast.
Some players in Australia are already positioning themselves for a prime piece of real estate in the new landscape.
James Packer's Publishing & Broadcasting Ltd and Seven Media Group have each joined private equity investors to privatise their media assets, ensuring they don't get swallowed up and giving them funds to expand their empires.
The new media laws, as one well-placed broadcast executive told the Business Herald, are a "once in a lifetime" change to a heavily regulated market and all the companies are looking at how they will emerge from the shakedown.
But some restrictions will remain - such as keeping the door closed to new free-to-air TV channels.
And the new environment is still a lot tougher than in New Zealand, where television, radio and newspaper industries are held by cross-media duopolies of foreign-owned companies.
In fact, the situation in New Zealand has been cited by critics of deregulation in Australia as an example of what can go wrong when regulation is too light.
New Zealand is unique in having media assets - old media assets at least - held in only a few hands, almost of all of them from overseas. The up-shot is that changes to Australian media ownership rules could have a more dramatic effect here than across the Tasman.
CanWest New Zealand boss Brent Impey says "anything is possible" for the company's assets. That is probably the reality for all Australasian media companies.
