Lost amid widely published speculation last week that Rupert Murdoch might divest his interests in DirecTV were definitive answers about what such a move would mean to the satellite TV industry at large: If Murdoch’s News Corp. was to sell its estimated $10 billion interest in DirecTV to Liberty Media for the latter’s 20 percent interest in News Corp., what might be the fallout?

“That’s a real hard question to answer,” says Steve Blum, an analyst with Tellus Venture Associates. “In the near term it doesn’t have a major impact on customers or direct day-to-day operations of DirecTV.”

While he suggested that any such deal would likely take months to finalize, Blum said the larger issue is how different an owner would be Liberty than News Corp.?

“Both are, at their hearts, content companies,” he said. “They both have a history of leveraging to increase the value of their platforms as content companies. That said, the devil’s in the details. Liberty has not historically been friendly to satellite… Is their objective to enhance satellite business vis-a-vis cable?

“They don’t have a track record for that,” Blum warned. “Whenever you have Liberty or John Malone involved, you have to ask how competitive is it versus cable, and how customer-oriented will it be? That’s a real issue for customers.”

Blum concluded that ultimately the deal might hinge upon an anti-trust standpoint.

“There are a number of different issues that this impacts on,” he said. “Laid out on paper, they both seek to own distribution platforms, [but] the execution and the strategies down the line would tend to be different.”