(04-30-2023 05:02 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  ...
I understand that there are government contracts and other types of deals to take years to get into place. I know because I’ve worked on a lot of them.

However, the media business just isn’t like that. Instead, it’s like a toddler that can’t see anything other than what was last week’s box office number or TV rating and constantly cycling through what’s hot or not and then tying it to how it impacted today’s stock price. I mean - David Zaslov just straight up threw away a completely done Batgirl movie (as in totally edited and ready to go to just flip the switch on either showing it in the theater or on streaming) in order to take a one-time tax write-off for Warner Bros. Discovery and really can’t do anything until they pay down more debt. Fox has to pay $787.5 million to settle the Dominion case and doesn’t have any broad-based streaming service to speak of. Comcast has a floundering Peacock streaming service and Paramount is actually getting killed the worst on cord cutting (as their MTV and Nickelodeon networks are getting hammered the worst compared to the other media companies). Even Disney is going through one of their worst set of layoffs in modern times and somehow can’t figure out a way to release a new Star Wars (freaking Star Wars!) movie.

The point is that these media companies really don’t know what they’re doing right now. They know their cable business is dying, but have no idea whether streaming will ever make them money. If they can’t get clarity on the “big rocks” that are proving to be an existential crisis for their entire businesses, they have no bandwidth to deal with the machinations of college athletics. The networks just want the end product - sure, they’ll pay for UT/OU in the SEC and USC/UCLA in the Big Ten and they’ll pass along hypothetical expansion valuations for conferences, but I think you’re overrating how much college sports means to these networks in the scheme of the incredible cost pressures that the entire industry is facing… and, even if they *do* care about college sports in 2030, these networks can’t even figure out if their own companies are going to survive in their current forms for the next 12-24 months.

Let’s put it this way: the only traditional media company that anyone has any real faith of still existing substantially in its current form 2 years from now (much less 5 or 10 years from now) is Disney. Comcast (or at least the NBC Universal portion), Warner Bros. Discovery, Fox and Paramount all have a pretty high chance of being bought or merged with each other in various forms in the next couple of years.

So, when you talk about network-driven consolidation in college sports, that’s hard to see because the entire media business is very likely going to go through its own massive consolidation. The Big 6 movie studios went down to the Big 5 with the Fox sale to Disney and we may be seeing that consolidate to a Big 4 or Big 3 sooner rather than later. These networks can’t deal with consolidation in tangentially related industries (like college sports) when they’re sorting out consolidation amongst themselves.

There might be further consolidation in college sports, but it’s not because Disney and Fox are getting all the parties into a room. These media companies can’t even get their own subsidiaries to talk to each other and coordinate things correctly.

This is a great post : )

I find media m&a news interesting and have been following it when I can for quite awhile.

And I think you're spot on about media companies and short term vs long term decisions.

The public companies are typically torn between several types of stockholders. 2 in particular are the institutional stockholders (like those that manage retirement plans) who are most interested in long term planning and long term strength of the asset (the business), and the day-to-day stock holders who want to see constant returns on their investment now. There are obviously others, and I am definitely over simplifying.

So when looking from that position, one could see why Chapek was eventually ousted - he apparently wasn't making either group happy.

I will make one distinction though - cable isn't dead, and I might argue that "dying" is the wrong adjective.

If you look at things like Hulu + Live TV - that's merely cable using a slightly different platform.

Eventually, the cable companies will figure out what works (and it will take some time getting the user interface better, for it to grow - something that all the streamers are dealing with yet).

In the meantime, companies will continue to milk that specific cow for all the milk it will give.

And it'll find its "new normal" the same way regular television (ota) has.

What we're seeing is another case of technology moving faster than people can adjust to it. And grouping various concepts as "streaming" is merely a marketing move. Many of these technologies are quite disparate.

And because there are so many new platform possibilities, companies are still trying to figure out what works - in real time - doing trial and error at the costs of billions. And this is a bit more complicated than deciding between VHS and Betamax, or HD-DVD and Blue-Ray. So it'll take time - something they really don't have as a cushion. By the time they start to figure things out, there's already a new technology coming out to upend everything.

And it hasn't helped that the modern consumer has become more and more fickle in their entertainment consumption choices, and honestly has their attention spans reducing daily. - "Look, squirrel! I mean, look, a new video posted!"

I think they'll eventually figure something out. There's just too much money tied up into these things.

So it's not "the end of the world", it's just "the end of the world as it might have been in the past".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changes_(D...owie_song)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BgF7Y3q-as

Ch-ch-ch-changes, indeed. - we're all getting older...