Imagine working at a legacy media company and hearing that this is what you will be competing against in the near future. Below are the opening remarks of Meta Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, from last night’s Q2 2024 earnings call, explaining how their AI investments are transforming advertising across Meta’s platforms: “AI is also…
“USA Networks, the media company controlled by Barry Diller, said Wednesday that it had matched an offer made by CBS Corp. for cable-TV rights to WWF programming and had filed a lawsuit against WWF, CBS and its soon-to-be-parent company Viacom Inc. to ensure that the popular shows stay on the top-rated cable network at least…
For the past few years, Live Nation has been a battleground stock. However, it was rare to hear debates around the company’s operational performance (save a nitpick on a divisional margin here and there). LYV’s dominance has been established and its growth levers have only increased with that dominance. The question has been whether or…
We and investors are struggling to make sense of WBD’s strategy to retain the NBA. For the past couple of years, Turner talked about how they would only renew their NBA contract if the terms made financial sense. They said that the NBA was not a must-have for Turner and they raised the broader issue…
The new NBA media rights agreement is finally coming to a conclusion, after multiple years of industry and investor anticipation. The deal will likely end up exactly as we predicted in our Top 24 for ’24, with Disney, NBC Universal and Amazon securing rights packages (link). While WBD’s Turner has said they will match Amazon,…
We believe Turner has until the end of the day tomorrow, Monday, to match either the NBC package ($2.5 billion/year) or the Amazon package ($1.8 billion/year). We have continually stated our belief that WBD/Turner will not match and that their posturing to-date has been a bluff (see The LightShed Podcast clip embedded to the right).…
We have gotten a ton of questions in reaction to yesterday’s post, Stop with the Warner Bros. Discovery Breakup Nonsense, with many investors genuinely interested in owning a pure-play streaming and studio company: HBO+Max+Warner Bros. (everyone concedes that “good WBD co” would still include linear HBO, since it cannot be separated from Max). Other legacy…
It’s comical to see the press writing about how WBD needs to spin off their dying linear TV businesses, considering the WarnerMedia/Discovery merger that closed just over two years ago (April 8, 2022) dramatically enlarged WarnerMedia’s dying linear TV business by combining it with Discovery’s dying TV business. The merger pitch was that combining Discovery’s…
Here are our 11 key questions for Netflix management on Thursday’s Q2 2024 earnings discussion (our Q1 2024 questions can be found here). 1) Will Exiting Xandr Exclusivity Open up the Advertising Spigot? Beginning in Q3 2024, you are no longer exclusive to Xandr. How should we think about the impact of moving away from Xandr…
Our post yesterday, Free TV is Soaring Led by YouTube, Tubi and Roku Channel, Why Not Pluto?, has generated a provocative question: who owns connected TV streaming traffic? You cannot watch Tubi content outside the Tubi app, whereas Pluto distributes its linear feeds both within its own app across all major connected TV platforms and…
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