The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Verizon is close to finalizing a deal to acquire Frontier, a company that provides fiber and DSL-based internet services across markets reaching 15 million homes, a 50% increase to the 30 million homes passed by Verizon. This acquisition represents another step towards the inevitable convergence of fixed and…
Legacy media companies have relied on the multichannel bundle for decades, leveraging the power of live sports and news to support their full portfolio of broadcast and cable networks. Legacy media companies effectively forced distributors to carry all of their major networks in their most widely distributed channel packages. While smaller bundles certainly exist, programmers…
Late Friday evening, the NBA filed a motion to dismiss WBD/Turner’s lawsuit, in which Warner Bros. Discovery hopes to force the NBA to allow Turner to match Amazon’s media rights distribution agreement. The NBA’s motion to dismiss leans heavily on WBD/Turner’s failure to match the exact terms of Amazon’s agreement (see the long list of…
We continue to believe the Paramount Special Committee will extend the Skydance transaction’s “go-shop” period by 15 days, as they await a formal bid from the Bronfman-led consortium. As we detailed yesterday (link), Bronfman’s co-investors include at least one party that leads us to believe the Redstone family is far more open to the Bronfman…
Shortly after U.S. District Court Judge Margaret Garnett granted Fubo’s preliminary injunction against Venu last Friday, we outlined the winners and losers here. Over the weekend, we read through the entire decision and highlighted the most interesting sections (annotated PDF here and embedded at the bottom of this post). 6 Interesting Takeaways: Why Was Venu…
Why would anyone in their right mind battle one of the richest families in the world to acquire Paramount? Let’s ignore the $400 million breakup fee to Skydance. Let’s ignore the fact that most investors believe Skydance is overpaying for Paramount, with over 100% of Paramount’s earnings derived from rapidly declining linear TV assets. Even…
At the end of a brutal week for legacy media stocks, Puck News’ Matt Belloni interviewed LightShed’s Rich Greenfield on his podcast, The Town. We discussed why basic cable networks are finally collapsing (meaningfully diverging from broadcast television), why Comcast talks tough on video negotiations but is unlikely to exit the video business given their…
Investors have bombarded us with questions about Warner Bros.’ Q2 2024 earnings call commentary. In turn, we thought it would be useful to showcase the key comments that sparked investor debate, followed by our reaction to each statement below in italics. While WBD stock is clearly selling off as financial expectations are coming down for…
1) How Do You Expect Epic Universe to Impact Disney? Historically, growth in the Orlando theme park industry outside of Walt Disney World, particularly at Universal Studios, has benefited Disney. Increased visitors to the market have led to Disney capturing the majority share of additional visitation time spent. In the meantime, while you have talked…
1) Will Turner Be More Profitable Without the NBA? WBD has repeatedly stated they have licensed more than enough sports content, even if NBA rights disappear, to renew MVPD/vMVPD carriage agreements at higher rates. How do we reconcile that with the statements made in your in-process lawsuit with the NBA, specifically the repeated irreparable harm…
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