In 2018, the year after Fox agreed to sell the majority of its assets to Disney, The New York Times Magazine reported (link) that Lachlan Murdoch attempted to buy his siblings’ ownership stakes in the Murdoch family trust (known as Cruden Financial Services). While details on the attempted transaction are scarce, the buyout discussions reportedly…
Last Friday, LightShed’s Rich Greenfield was interviewed by Puck News’ Matt Belloni on The Town podcast, embedded in full below, followed by key highlights with timestamps. The discussion started with why Comcast/NBCU is uniquely positioned to spinoff its linear cable network assets relative to its legacy media peers, the acquisition opportunities for SpinCo go well…
Basic cable is in trouble, big trouble. Comcast is kicking their cable networks out of the company, Warner Bros. Discovery investors are begging the company to spinout/separate their cable networks, Paramount ignored multiple opportunities to sell-off non-core cable networks (selling the entire company instead) and Disney explored exiting its linear TV assets. We signaled the…
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 why The Trade Desk is entering the #tvOSwars, how they could scale devices, how adding first-party data could fuel The Trade Desk’s growth and whether CTV content…
The Trade Desk publicly confirmed they are launching their own tvOS, called Ventura, in 2025 (press release), following three months of constant public denial (including our post, which tied to Lowpass.cc). The Trade Desk also noted Ventura was three years in the making, raising the obvious question of what took them so long to publicly…
Today could be the final Liberty Investor Day. Simplification of the structure continues with the announced split-off of LLYV yesterday. More importantly, CEO Greg Maffei announced his retirement from Liberty effective at year-end 2024. Truly the end of an era. Liberty has executed on more transactions than we can remember over the past few decades.…
There has been a lot of talk about the impact podcasting had on this year’s Presidential Election, but the focus should be on video podcasting and, in turn, the power of YouTube (and the longer-term potential of Spotify as they lean more aggressively into video). This week’s episode of Colin and Samir (OG YouTubers), titled…
Last Friday, Puck’s John Ourand interviewed LightShed’s Rich Greenfield on The Varsity podcast. They discussed how M&A could impact the media sector under a Trump administration, the tension between dream mergers and egos, why media companies waited so long (too long) to exit their linear TV assets, whether Netflix will become a major player in…
On April 24, 2024, President Biden signed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA) into law. Unless delayed three months by President Biden, PAFACA takes effect on January 19, 2025, the day before inauguration. To date, there has been no indication that Biden will delay PAFACA from taking effect on January 19th.…
Just days after the public launch of ChatGPT web search functionality, OpenAI created a browser extension to switch your default search engine to ChatGPT (see the notification on ChatGPT’s site embedded below). You can download OpenAI’s Chrome extension here. After installing the Chrome extension, anything you type in the Chrome browser bar performs a ChatGPT…
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