- Are you still paying for cable TV?
- If so, consider that the people who own cable TV networks seem increasingly uninterested in hanging on to them.
- That’s the real story behind WBD’s corporate maneuvering Thursday — to make a cable TV spin-off or sale much more likely.
Comcast is ditching its cable TV networks. Now Warner Bros. Discovery may do the same.
That’s the takeaway from Thursday’s news that WBD is splitting up its cable TV business from its streaming and studio operations.
To be clear: WBD is not saying that it intends to ditch its cable networks, like TNT and the Food Network.
Instead, it is using hand-wavy language like “a new corporate structure designed to enhance its strategic flexibility and create potential opportunities to unlock additional shareholder value” to describe what it’s doing.
But to be super-clear: The reason WBD is doing this now is so it can get rid of its cable operations in the future, perhaps by merging them with the cable TV spin-off that Comcast has planned for next year. And, just as important, because it wants to tell Wall Street that a breakup is on the table.
Not coincidentally, WBD shares are up 13% on the news.
Reminder: WBD has already floated this idea before, though less formally. Earlier this summer, WBD execs said (quietly) they were looking at the same kind of corporate restructuring, and then decided to back off the idea.
What has changed since then?
On the one hand, not a lot. The structural challenges around a split still remain: Namely, the fact that while cable TV networks are declining assets, they are still profitable ones, and those profits help keep their owners’ other assets afloat.
On the other hand: Now that Comcast has announced it is absolutely going to split off its declining cable TV assets, it helps make other splits more likely. That’s because Comcast’s spun-off cable TV operation will want to find other cable TV networks to add to its collection, so it can increase negotiating power. Which (potentially) solves the “who wants to buy a declining asset?” problem WBD was looking at before.
Also of note: Donald Trump’s second term in office may be much, much friendlier to consolidation, as WBD CEO David Zaslav noted the morning after Trump’s election. (Reminder: The Trump 2.0 merger mania many people expect may not extend across the board. Trump’s incoming team continues to make noise about reining in Big Tech, and that scrutiny may also apply to (at least some parts of) Big Media.)
All of which is worth remembering if you still pay for a package of cable TV networks, which means you are continually being asked to pay more for them. (Just Thursday, Google said it was hiking the price of its YouTube TV cable bundle by 14%.) You, the consumer, are being told cable TV is worth paying more for. But cable TV owners want to get these things off their books.
