No one wants to be the Ten affiliate - they have the lowest ratings, and even worse regionally due to the demographics Ten target being skewed towards metro areas.
Southern Cross optimised their business for that, running an ultra low cost Ten affiliate, very little rebranding, bare minimum local content and more. WIN come into it with a high cost base, so they’ve learnt now how much more value a Nine affiliation has to them.
So, yes - it’s very likely that WIN are talking to Nine and making good offers to them to try and get that affiliation back. Likewise, there were those rumblings regarding whether SCA were booking multi-platform ad sales as sales for their radio station to reduce their television revenue, and thus reduce their revenue based affiliate fee share.
As I did there - you can make a very good case for there being an affiliation swap. As such, you can make a very believable post that it’s happening - because you are building a “rumour” on top of what is something that is in the realm of possibility, which makes it sound credible.
The problem is - as I said, a deal needs to be notified to shareholders. That it has not been, means there’s not a deal. It’s that simple. Publicly traded companies simply must make their shareholders aware of major changes like that.
A non-final deal is no deal at all. Just ask those at Ten about the done deal they had on Cricket rights…