Over the past year, Meta’s astonishing success in replicating TikTok with Reels, effectively returning ad measurement/targeting to pre-IDFA/ATT performance levels and a sharp focus on headcount efficiency has led to a near tripling of its shares. At the same time, Meta has leaned hard into Generative AI, even as it continues to invest far more than…
Legacy media companies are all facing increasingly stiff headwinds as their linear TV assets collapse and they are forced to scale back nascent streaming platforms that continue to bleed billions each year. When businesses run out of growth, they turn to cost-cutting and M&A. Unfortunately for legacy media, investors have mercilessly penalized companies that have combined linear…
TKO investors entered 2024 with a lot of trepidation about media rights, which has reflected in the company’s stock price. There was no obvious licensor of domestic Raw rights, while the international rights marketplace has been a question mark. We arrived at our incorrect prediction for WBD to take the domestic Raw rights by process…
Here are our ten key questions for Netflix management on Tuesday’s Q4 2023 earnings discussion (our Q3 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) Does WWE Signal Greater Interest in Sports Content? Netflix has repeatedly…
This is the Tenth Edition of the LightShed Earnings Scorecard, our stats on the quality of TMT earnings calls. This quarter we tracked the earnings calls of 74 TMT companies, up 2 from last quarter. We included Instacart for the first time, Dish and EchoStar returned, and MSG Sports dropped because of its semi-annual cycle.…
Happy New Year. We are kicking off LightShed’s TMT coverage in the new year by laying out our top predictions and events to watch for in 2024 – what we call our #Top24for24. To see what we got right and wrong in last year’s Top 23 list for 2023, click here. We also discussed those predictions at length in…
As usual, our most read post of the year is the first post of the year: the LightShed Team’s predictions for the year ahead. Topics that drove the most interest included our advice for media companies as they attempt to transition from linear to streaming, Disney’s strategic pivots, potential legacy media M&A, the future of…
Following Wednesday’s report (link) that Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount engaged in merger talks, Puck News’ Matt Belloni interviewed LightShed’s Rich Greenfield. The discussion included why legacy media mergers will likely destroy value, why Paramount is unlikely to be sold prior to completing major carriage renegotiations in the next six months, our prescriptions for subscale…
In the early-mid 2010’s, we hammered legacy media companies repeatedly for not embracing streaming. We gave up by 2018, coming to the realization that these companies were simply not equipped to compete in the streaming wars — see the quote below from our Oct 2018, We Were Wrong: Resistance Is Futile — 4 Reasons Why Legacy…
If you look back 20+ years, the same executives that were shaping Disney’s future then are the key players today (as shown in the management timeline below, including Disney CEO Bob Iger and former execs Tom Staggs, Kevin Mayer and Jay Rasulo). This is despite the fact that the media landscape has changed demonstrably over…
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