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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32183 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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CNN is rumored to be suffering serious financial issues

I don't know if that's a "rumor". Well, I suppose the specifics of how CNN itself is doing is slightly a rumor.

But the stitched-together shambling corpse that is Warner Bros. Discovery is objectively in terrible shape.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/06/david-zaslav-warner-bros-discovery-cash-flow-debt.html

NYTimes has done some fantastic reporting on the gamma ray burst of stupid that caused all this nonsense with Warner, but, paywall.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/19/business/media/att-time-warner-deal.html

That's not even the worst merger Time Warner has been involved in, they gave 55% of the company for AOL in Jan 2000. It didn't look good by the end of the quarter.

Lol. Warner should probably be a persons largest stock position. Up 50% this year. It was just spun out of AT and T which probably didn’t have a clue how to convert to a streaming player. And some bumps in the restructuring from that. It ran into problems with a lot of the equity being spun out to AT and T holders (dividend investors) and then a tough stock market and tax loss selling late last year.

The debt isn’t a problem. The average maturity is like 14 years at 4.5% rates. It’s locked in long term mostly so the article completely misses the point that there’s no interest rate risks with the firm. High rates might even helps them because it makes market values of existing debt cheaper to buy on the open market.

CNN was a fiasco. Wish they didn’t own it but a legacy asset. And HBO though gone a little wokey still is the preferred venue for artists.

If they figure out streaming no reason some day they can’t pay off a lot of debt and get a Netflix like valuation. Then that 30 billion market cap could be an 8-12 bagger.

Im not sure streaming firms ever get the valuations of the old days but the main issue is an industry with a few scaled players and more competition when it use to just be Netflix. Wasn’t a woke story but a too much competition story. And wbd suffers from having to pivot from an old high cash flow model to a new format which companies do struggle with. But the content library is as good as anyones so they have a fighting chance.

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