Welcome to the 20th edition of the LightShed Earnings Scorecard. It was a quarter of firsts. AI mentions set a record, Apple made a debut nobody wants (its first trip to the Hall of Shame), and Rich Greenfield finally cracked a Disney call after nearly a decade in exile…
Brian Roberts has finally decided to set NBCU free via a spin-off after more than a decade of investor clamoring. While most CMCSA investors are hoping NBCU will be sold before the spin is completed or in the years after, we do not believe that is the plan. We see Roberts looking to use NBCU’s standalone currency to hunt acquisitions that bulk up and modernize the company…
EchoStar put Dish DBS and Dish Wireless into a prepackaged Chapter 11 in Houston yesterday. Read the structure and you see the whole point of the exercise. It is clean for EchoStar and potentially brutal for the tower companies. It also sets up a third party, whether SpaceX or someone else, to step in for the terrestrial network assets on the cheap, just as SpaceX assembles the spectrum that could use them…
Peacock has become a streaming platform. With the launch of Starz on Peacock, subscribers can now watch Starz content within the Peacock app itself. Peacock joins Amazon Channels, Roku Premium Subscriptions, YouTube Primetime Channels, and Netflix as true platform aggregators. What started as a way for Peacock to launch (yet-to-die) Regional Sports Networks has evolved into something far more interesting (the buy flow for Starz inside Peacock is embedded at the bottom of the screen).
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player… Back in January 2026, in the midst of the Warner Bros. Discovery auction, Comcast Co-CEO Mike Cavanagh stated: “It doesn’t get stronger by being smaller as a standalone entity,” implying Comcast would not spin-out NBC Universal without it being part of a larger M&A transaction. Today, Cavanagh…
We view the spinout of Comcast’s media business as nothing more than an attempt to stem the downward trajectory of the stock and boost the waning morale of employees with some basic financial engineering. Cable stocks have dropped to eye-popping free cash flow yields, and in Comcast’s case the market appears to assign little or no value to its media business at all. The hope is that spinning the media business will give the stock some life. Yet the stock has already faded from its morning spike, and the transaction will take a while to complete.
Legacy media has long suffered from the innovator’s dilemma, with most players allergic to risk. Fox buying Roku is a bold move. Fox has repeatedly talked about using its financial strength to make acquisitions and was routinely criticized for being underlevered, but Roku is a far larger…
Roku’s tvOS has become the “gatekeeper to streaming,” so why hasn’t anyone bought it? We’ve predicted multiple times that it would be acquired, and we have been wrong. Could this time be different? At ~$25-30 billion, with a coveted logged-in user graph and the CTV ad wars…
Watching the NBA Finals this week was a strong reminder of the power of live sports and its importance to the media ecosystem. While final numbers from last night’s Game 4 are not in yet, Game 3 was ABC/ESPN’s most watched NBA Finals Game 3 since 1998…
Could You Buy the Knicks Soon? LightShed’s Brandon Ross Interviewed on the Business Decision Podcast
The New York Knicks are 2 wins away from their first NBA title in 53 years. Naturally, MSGS investors are focused on a windfall of postseason revenue, especially from ticket sales at the Garden. However, work continues behind the scenes on another Dolan spin-off – this time separating the Knicks from the Rangers. This should…
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