Here are our ten key questions for Netflix management on tomorrow’s Q2 2026 earnings discussion (our Q1 …
Since announcing its pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery in September 2025, Paramount has projected nothing but confidence. It has repeatedly stated that the WBD acquisition is “pro-competitive” and will create “a next-generation global media and entertainment company” that can…
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…
You must be logged in to post a comment.