Evan Spiegel, Snap’s Co-Founder and CEO, is one of the great product visionaries of our time. Think about what Snap created and how their innovations have profoundly altered the future of mobile communications and video content consumption: While Spiegel and team certainly made the right decision not to sell to Facebook, now called Meta, in…
Here are our nine key questions for Netflix management on Thursday’s Q1 2024 earnings discussion (our Q4 2023 questions can be found here). Note: Netflix is no longer utilizing a sell-side analyst to moderate Q&A, shifting instead to questions submitted by analysts through an online form. 1) Explain How You Make Better/Cheaper Films? A recent New York…
Yesterday, the WSJ (link) reported that four members of the Paramount Board of Directors will not seek reelection at the company’s upcoming annual meeting. Paramount is expected to file its proxy later this week, with the annual meeting occurring on June 4th (proxy). It’s worth noting that Paramount’s distribution agreement with Charter expires on April…
Welcome to the Eleventh Edition of the LightShed Earnings Scorecard, our stats on the quality of earnings calls. This quarter we listened to 75 companies talk for 66 hours. Unfortunately 40% of that time was still allocated to reading press releases and prepared comments. AI remains the hot topic Artificial Intelligence was discussed on over…
We are getting a lot of questions about governance at Paramount. Having lived through the past 30 years of upheaval at Viacom and CBS, we wanted to provide some important context to Paramount’s current situation. National Amusements (NAI) does not need the approval of public Paramount shareholders to change Paramount’s bylaws, affect M&A and/or change…
Reddit (RDDT) waited a long time to IPO after multiple false starts. The timing appears to have been excellent, with the stock up significantly since its IPO. As a long-time Reddit user, we find the platform incredibly valuable to research hyper-specific/niche topics with information that cannot be found elsewhere. The question is whether very useful/unique…
Look at the top television series across major streaming platforms today: As legacy media tries to bring down streaming losses by reducing programming and marketing spend, we are seeing more and more legacy media companies air the same content on linear TV and streaming platforms. While “next day” streaming access to broadcast TV content is…
Given the enormous usage and engagement of TikTok in the US, banning TikTok would be a windfall for Meta, Google and Snapchat. Snap shares would likely be the biggest winner in market cap appreciation on a percentage basis and Meta the biggest winner in terms of absolute dollar market cap appreciation (ties to our Lightning…
It is easy to look at Paramount’s $7.5 billion market cap relative to its predecessors Viacom and CBS a decade ago (Viacom $37 billion and CBS $37 billion), let alone five years ago (Viacom $12 billion and CBS $18 billion) and conclude that the Shari Redstone/National Amusements-led strategy to merge the companies failed. That view…
We do not expect Cogent (CCOI) to generate enough free cash flow to fund its dividend, let alone its growth. We expect this to require the company to perpetually increase its debt at prevailing interest rates. Unfortunately, we also expect Cogent’s EBITDA in 2028 to be lower than 2024 pushing debt leverage over 6x in…
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