The parent company of HGTV and Food Network has held discussions about selling itself to Discovery Communications, people briefed on the matter said on Wednesday, raising the prospect of further consolidation in a rapidly changing media industry.

The broadcaster, Scripps Networks Interactive, has also held sale talks with other suitors, one of these people added.

It is unclear whether Scripps will choose to complete a deal this time around, given that it held talks with Discovery three years ago and backed away.

Representatives for Scripps and Discovery declined to comment on the talks, which were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

News of the talks sent shares in Scripps Networks up 18 percent in early trading on Wednesday. That gave the channel operator a market value of more than $10 billion. Shares in Discovery were up nearly 5 percent, giving the company a market value of about $15.5 billion.

The discussions involving Scripps come as content companies band together to stand up to increasingly powerful cable and broadband service providers.

Already, a host of companies across the media and telecommunications spectrum have chosen to unite. The cable channel Starz agreed last year to be acquired by Lionsgate Entertainment. Sinclair, one of the country’s biggest local television station owners, secured a deal to buy Tribune. And of course, in a blockbuster $85 billion deal last fall, AT&T agreed to buy Time Warner.

The creation of giant conglomerates has left companies in the middle scrambling to find partners to gain scale.

For Scripps, a tie-up with Discovery would make sense. The two companies held talks to combine in 2014, before those discussions fell apart over a range of issues, including price.

Discovery, which is backed by the cable mogul John C. Malone, has been an active deal maker since the collapse of the Scripps talks three years ago. The broadcaster has pushed abroad to expand its international presence, with deals to buy Eurosport and other foreign programming rights.

That could prove compelling to Scripps, whose portfolio of channels is primarily domestic except for holdings like a 50 percent stake in Britain’s UKTV.

The two companies’ properties could also be combined into an entertainment-focused “skinny bundle,” a collection of channels that pay-TV subscribers could choose instead of a more standard and more expensive broad array of programming. Discovery has sought to create such an offering, which could include channels like OWN and TLC as well as Scripps properties.

Scripps’s chief executive, Ken Lowe, is friends with his counterpart at Discovery, David Zaslav, and both men were inducted into the Cable Hall of Fame in April.