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…
When Paramount reports Q4 2023 tonight, we expect management to be excited about the success of recent live events on CBS including Super Bowl LVIII, NFL Playoffs and Grammys, on top of the recent performance of their movie One Love. But these are distractions from the far larger issues that have the entire company’s employee…
Disney and Charter Established Streaming in the Liner Bundle Back in September, Disney and Charter reached a landmark affiliation agreement that enabled Charter Spectrum Select tier subscribers to access the ad-supported tier of Disney+ at no additional charge (in the process, Disney agreed to allow Charter to drop several of Disney’s smaller linear TV networks…
Over the past few years, Warner Bros. Discovery shares have fallen dramatically as management lowered 2023 earnings guidance projections several times, despite the help of dramatic cost-cutting efforts and an aggressive shift to licensing content to third-parties such as Netflix (versus keeping all their content for their own vertically-integrated streaming service, Max). Below is a…
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