Twenty-one years ago, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts led a failed hostile takeover of Disney. Five years later, in 2009, Comcast acquired a 51% stake in NBCUniversal and grew that stake to 100% ownership in 2013. While the timing of Comcast’s NBCUniversal purchase was incredible, buying at trough valuations, the company’s conglomeration of assets has failed…
Comcast shares are down 21% YTD, 30% over the past year, and effectively flat over the past decade. Worse yet, the stock’s conglomerate structure has it trading at a discount to both its cable/telco and media peers, as shown in the table embedded to the right. Initial excitement around the in-process spinoff of Versant, Comcast’s…
In 2011, Netflix outbid HBO for House of Cards as its first major original, with the series premiering in February 2013 (though the first original was actually Lilyhammer in 2012). Days before House of Cards launched, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos (Chief Content Officer at the time) stated, “The goal … is to become HBO faster than…
In our PSKY/WBD post yesterday, Does the Math Behind Paramount’s Bid for Warner Bros. Discovery Work?, we laid out the valuation and leverage of a $25 offer for Paramount. Given our belief that Larry Ellison now appears willing to invest upwards of $30 billion of his own cash to fund Paramount’s WBD offer, we assumed…
Last week, we joined the Marketecture podcast, hosted by Ari Paparo and Eric Franchi (full episode embedded below, followed by key highlights and timestamps). During the podcast, we discussed the Ellison family’s master plan, the tech-driven transformation that needs to occur at Paramount, will Paramount succeed in acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, what else Paramount could buy…
Here are our ten key questions for Netflix management on tonight’s Q3 2025 earnings discussion (our Q2 2025 questions can be found here). 1) What implications do you see from potential legacy media consolidation? How does legacy media consolidation impact Netflix in terms of licensing original content and catalog? As legacy media consolidates, do you fear…
Time and time again, money talks far louder than legacy relationships across Hollywood and Sports Media rights: Since taking control of Paramount, the Skydance team led by CEO David Ellison has proven the power of using money to outbid rivals: taking all UFC rights from ESPN, bringing South Park back to Paramount+ from HBO Max,…
This is the Seventeenth Edition of the LightShed Earnings Scorecard, our ongoing analysis of quarterly earnings call quality. In Q2, we listened to 77 TMT earnings calls. MSG Sports rejoined with its fiscal year-end results, while Paramount was excluded after skipping Q&A. For the record, The LightShed team is unanimously supportive of President Trump’s initiative…
Last month (link), we highlighted that ESPN’s DTC launch was actually less about DTC and more about creating yet another network that it could force into MVPDs/vMVPDs bundles: “So while the public-facing ESPN Unlimited pitch is all about direct-to-consumer streaming, no bundle required, in reality Disney is far more focused on driving MVPDs/vMVPDs to bundle…
Last week, Variety wrote about the debut of Warner Bros.’ 2025 Superman on HBO Max with the following headline: “Superman Hits 13 Million Views in 10 Days of Streaming, Biggest HBO Max Movie Launch Since Barbie (link to full story).” While Superman’s $615 million of global box office this past summer was underwhelming relative to…
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