A year which began with idle speculation over a Disney bid for Netflix ended with the entertainment group’s acquisition of premium media content assets from 21st Century Fox for $52.4 billion in stock. The aim was to compete head-on with Netflix and Amazon, remembering that during 2017 Disney had announced it was pulling its content from the former’s catalogue while launching its own ESPN-based sports streaming service in 2018. The key second move would then follow in 2018 with a full-blown OTT offering combining live sports with movies, TV shows, documentaries and news. It was speculation over the synergy between Disney’s ESPN live sports content and the Netflix sVoD service that prompted that earlier speculation of a merger, but it…