It’s now up to the DOJ to decide on the lease terms for T-Mobile’s use of Dish’s 600 MHz spectrum. The DOJ might also need to play a role in resolving whatever outstanding issues have delayed the closing of Dish’s $1.4 billion purchase of Boost. We make recommendations on both and question whether the DOJ…
The global movie exhibition industry came to a screeching halt by mid-March, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Hollywood studios with feature films in the middle of release or whose marketing dollars had already been spent leading up to release scrambled to shift titles into Premium Video-on-Demand (PVOD) and/or Subscription Video-on-Demand (SVOD) as we saw with…
So much has changed since our last quotes review published on March 7th (link), before shelter-in-place orders took effect. Q1 2020 earnings calls were filled with commentary around managing through the pandemic, liquidity and the uncertainty that lies ahead. Below are the most impactful takeaways from Q1 2020 earnings in streaming video, gaming, television, movies,…
In 2019, as legacy media companies finally came to the realization (albeit, more forced than realized) that they had to pivot away from the dying multichannel video bundle, we highlighted the risk that Amazon, Apple and Roku could be the real winners, as legacy media did not appear to have the “guts” to really go…
There has been a surprising focus/obsession among investors and the industry press over the relative subscriber base size/growth of SVOD platforms and not enough focus on relative SVOD revenues and revenue growth. We highlighted this issue in our Six Issues Disney Did Not Address Last Night That Need to be Answered (link), which centered on…
We are downgrading Cogent to Neutral from Buy on disappointing revenue growth in Q1 and new questions about the company’s ability to sustain dividend growth. The massive slowdown in the normally predictable Corporate customer base was particularly troubling. Dating back to 2018, we expected Q2 2019 to be the trough quarter for Cogent’s revenue growth…
We walked away from Disney’s fiscal Q2 (March) earnings conference call even more convinced that investor expectations for fiscal 2021 and 2022 are far too high (see yesterday’s downgrade to SELL, link). But what really upset us was that there were several important issues that were never addressed by the company or even asked about…
Our April 15th report on Disney titled Disney’s Unique Vulnerability to COVID-19 Should Keep Investors Away centered on how we thought about fiscal (September) 2021 earnings relative to fiscal 2019, acknowledging that 2020 would likely be ignored by investors. Yet, the more we have learned in the past few weeks and thought about how we…
As parts of the world begin to emerge from quarantine, we have eight critical questions for legacy media executives to answer as they begin to report Q1 2020 earnings this week: 1) Is Talent Comfortable With Restarting Production? Both Warner Bros. (link) and Netflix (link) have talked about the challenges and complexities of restarting production.…
The global video games industry has benefited from technology driven secular tailwinds for several years. More players touch games every year, players are playing for longer, and publishers are able to directly monetize time spent, with all of this at a higher margin. The trend has been well established. At the same time, the games…
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