BRITAIN'S highly successful satellite-television operator, BSkyB, is habitually talked of as if it were an integral part of Rupert Murdoch's media empire. In fact, although News Corp effectively controls the firm, it owns only 39% of it. Now Mr Murdoch, along with Chase Carey, News Corp's chief operating officer, wants to get his hands on the rest, making an informal offer of £7.8 billion ($11.5 billion) to buy out the remaining 61%.

Assuming he can get the necessary clearances from British and European Union regulators, Mr Murdoch's main challenge will be to agree on a price with BSkyB's independent directors. His offer is worth 700p a share; their response so far has been: nice try Rupert, but come back with something above 800p and then we'll see.

It's not hard to see why the media mogul wants Sky (as it is known to viewers) all to himself. It has had a terrific recession, not only adding many more subscribers but extracting more money from each user. It is closing in on 10m subscribers, and its revenues in the nine months to the end of March grew by an impressive 10%, to £4.4 billion. It has done extremely well out of high-definition TV and PVRs (Sky+ boxes) and hopes to repeat the trick with 3-D broadcasting, in which it is a world pioneer—its 3-D screens are now popping up in pubs across the land. Rights to broadcast football and other sports remain the foundation of the company but it has moved well beyond sport into broadband delivery and telephony.

It probably makes sense for News Corp to bring Sky fully into the company if it can get it at a decent price. News Corp could do with some more geographic diversity (it has Star India, Sky Italia, etc, but they aren't worth nearly as much as BSkyB). Although Sky has shown itself to be recession-resistant, Fox's American television business is not, and neither are News Corp's newspapers.

The purchase, if it goes through, is part of a trend towards media companies looking more like, well, media companies. Forget the splashy purchases of supposedly synergistic online businesses like AOL and MySpace (the big media firms would certainly like to forget them). These days they are all doubling down on media, especially content, and shearing off everything else. Hence Disney's acquisition of Marvel, TimeWarner's divorce from AOL, Comcast's in-process merger with NBC Universal, and now this.