On Monday, mere days after Brian Roberts signaled his intention to spin off NBCUniversal and Sky into a stand-alone media business, a glimmer of his masterplan may have emerged. Sky C.E.O. Dana Strong announced a $2.14 billion deal to acquire ITV’s television holdings—but not its studio business, which will list separately.

The deal, which she described as “a defining moment for British media,” in many ways mirrors various transactions that have already taken place on this side of the pond—from Brian’s own previous Versant spin to David Zaslav’s pre-Paramount split of his studios and networks businesses—as media conglomerates uncouple their declining cable and linear assets from their more valuable studios. “This is really about [ITV] clearing a path to auction its studios [business],” one industry insider explained.

ITV Studios, which produces Love Island and The Voice, among myriad other shows, is the more valuable asset, but was weighed down by the structurally challenged broadcast business. The split will allow the studio asset to go public and position itself as a pure play to prospective buyers who didn’t want to inherit the linear albatross. “Every private equity firm [and] every media investor has been running the slide rule over ITV for years,” one industry insider told me. “The sticking point was always the structurally declining broadcast business in the U.K. regulatory regime.”

For NBCUniversal-Sky, meanwhile, that’s okay. ITV’s television business represented one of the few available options to provide scale for a company that had maxed out its own growth. ITV delivers 40 million weekly viewers and 16.5 million monthly digital users, and also includes significant sports rights—largely soccer and rugby. In essence, the deal is a microcosm of NBCUniversal’s broader post-spin playbook. It is now in the audience aggregation business, and happy to license content—including from its old studio partner, with which it will have a long-term supply agreement.

And yet some media executives noted that the deal, while logical in the short term, could significantly complicate a future sale of the overall business. Last week, I predicted that new NBCUniversal chief Mike Cavanagh would be a buyer before flipping to a seller—bulking up the NBCUniversal portfolio for a few years in order to position the company for a sale. The ITV deal would presumably require a future buyer to untangle those assets. It’s “baffling,” one veteran media executive posited. “Buying the platform [and] not the studio makes them harder to acquire from a regulatory standpoint. … For instance, it will be harder for Netflix to buy it without agreeing to divest assets in the U.K.”

Maybe. But perhaps that’s a sign that Brian was indeed being genuine when he said last week that he was “absolutely not” positioning NBCUniversal for a sale, and instead building a scaled platform that could survive in the jungle alongside Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, et al. Alternatively, the ITV acquisition may simply reflect a more pragmatic understanding that the path to maximizing enterprise value isn’t through keeping NBCUniversal pristine for a sale, but by at least making it too strategically important to ignore.