Yes, it is indeed possible that Seven West Media (SWM) bid for PRT in the event the reach restrictions are relaxed or repealed. But let's think things through a bit more as to where SWM's interests lie here - C7, being a major shareholder and 30-year affiliate of Prime, is PRT's only real logical acquirer. The problem for PRT is that C7 significantly controls the price at which it might acquire PRT, because not only is it the major shareholder but it is PRT's major supplier (of programming) - so it's really up to C7 as to whether it chooses to internalize PRT via acquisition and potentially realize those large synergies of which you speak, or bleed it dry by ratcheting up syndication costs. Make no mistake that C7 (or SWM) will do whatever is economically best for C7, not what's best for PRT.
On MTS - well, maybe there's some similarities there, but i don't think selling groceries is an industry in seemingly terminal structural decline like FTA television is, so i think you want to be careful drawing too many comparisons there. I think the much better comparison for PRT is PMP (which i owned until late last year), and the two are trading at very similar EBITDA & free cash flow multiples to one another.
Usually if a stock is trading at a very high dividend yield, that's telling you something about the sustainability of that dividend. I think you want to be very careful about extrapolating today's >10% PRT yield into the future - i can see a world where last year's 3.7 cents per share dividend quickly becomes two or less cents per share (just like how it went from 6.8 cents to 3.7 cents in a single year from FY15 to FY16). As the old saying goes, if the forecast yield looks too good be true, it's usually because it is. And in terms of payout ratios, do you think there may have been a reason for PRT suddenly dropping its payout ratio from ~75% core earnings in FY15 to 50% in FY16? My theory would be that they received a friendly call from their bankers along the lines of: "we don't feel too comfortable with the size of our exposure here given the way things are heading - we won't be rolling over this facility in April 2018 unless you start taking our exposure down more aggressively than you have been". So PRT was basically forced to cut its payout ratio, to my way of thinking.
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