Warner Eyes Paramount; Its Last Two Disastrous Mergers Weren't Disastrous Enough | Hacker News Reader

Warner Eyes Paramount; Its Last Two Disastrous Mergers Weren't Disastrous Enough

techdirt.com

48 pointsrntn26 comments

> Outside of the massive debt load, the paper doesn’t seem to think it’s important to inform readers about the endless, pointless, and clearly harmful chaos from the company’s last two shitty mergers.

The NY Times seems to generally view business events through the lens of top management. When unions obtain wage increases, The NY Times is concerned about the effect on the business, and totally uninterested in families earning a living wage.

Families earning a living wage don’t buy ads or subscriptions from the NYT.

How much of that is due to the fact that the NY Times, in spite of its nationwide (and worldwide) readership, still tries to be a newspaper for New York specifically, and therefore many local readers of its business section will be on Wall Street or executives in companies headquartered in Manhattan?

There are a lot of news sources that are written primarily to inform investors, like WSJ and Bloomberg. I wouldn't place the NYT in the same niche, although I suppose most business reporting takes a similar perspective. That having been said, NYT has reported on working conditions at various employers as well, along with various other, let's say "negative coverage".

I mean what are they looking for here? They're criticizing a fairly to the point, straight information article for not being an opinion article.

My prediction is Zaslav will… go ahead with all of this, since he only seems to execute ideas that everyone knows are terrible in both the short and long term.

There’s finally enough people noticing Zaslav’s wrecking ball outside of Hollywood (which has been vocal in criticizing him as ruining everything since the WB-Discovery merger first was approved), including US government officials [1].

I think the markets will refuse to reward him this time, and more importantly, I think the DOJ/FTC will refuse to allow this merger to happen, having seen the fallout from last time. I don’t even think the studios’ cozy relationship with the Democratic Party will save him this time, as I’m certain smaller studios and likely even Disney absolutely do not want this to happen either.

From there I can only hope the board of directors will fire him. In an effective government, I would hope the whole WB-Discovery merger to be broken up, but I’m not holding my breath.

[1] https://x.com/joaquincastrotx/status/1737669717223964730?s=4...

> That’s going to drive users not just to free alternatives like YouTube or TikTok, but back to piracy after a decade of inroads with U.S. consumers.

Seriously this. I've avoided piracy for 10+ years now because the deal with these media companies was that I could buy affordable, easy-to-access media that I could consume on-demand. Since this was a better deal than browsing sketchy malware and ad-ridden sites or torrents and risking the wrath of my ISP, it was no problem to shell out a few bucks. Now dealing with that mess is objectively a better experience, where you can lose thousands of dollars of purchased digital media on some "fail upwards brunchlord's" whim.

You'll find that as long as you use an adblocker, the experience actually isn't a mess at all.

The market no longer rewards "good business." It focuses on rewarding "clever financial tricks."

It's short term thinking manifest.

How is this merger a "clever financial trick?"

David Zaslav clicked on a “This ONE trick the IRS hates!!!” link and then turned “shrink entire content portfolio” into a business model

Oh no.

Warner Brothers killed only four days ago the Global Cycling Network (GCN+). A novel streaming service providing global coverage of cycling, self made documentations and news. The paying consumers loved it. Because it was only what the audience wanted - a thing only possible with modern day streaming.

The next victim will be Star Trek?

If the paying consumers that love it don't add up to cover the expenses of what it takes to deliver the content, then you can't blame them for pulling the plug on such a niche channel. I have no idea what their backend expenses are for them to operate a channel, nor do I have any idea how much that channel was earning. Just pointing out that feedback from an echo chamber of like minded people might be out of touch with reality.

Just pointing out, having spent the first third of my career working IN television, that perfectly profitable programs and networks are discarded simply because they are not profitable enough for the manager du jour.

These entities are removed to make room for programming that appeals to the lowest common denominator, which after initial successes will provide ever lasting grief as to why advertisers don’t want to buy on such LCD programming.

There's also a history of television programming being dropped for completely non-commercial reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_purge

> are not profitable enough

With businesses, you need a certain amount of profitability for the risk or investors will look elsewhere. Maybe your stable, profitable business has a 3% profit margin. Cool, but if it's not growing, I can get 5% on treasuries.

Your comment also depends on when you were in television. Before streaming, prime time slots were limited, so being profitable alone isn't enough if the average pilot you pick up is more profitable.

“Hollywood Accounting” gets its name for a reason.

I guarantee you there is _no one_ who knows the exact ROI of a show in terms of dollars. In fact they don’t want to know (because it would be a liability). Often times studios set up entire shell companies for tv shows that they “loan” studio money to, and then set a variable interest rate slightly greater than the rate the shows bring in money, so they can declare a loss no matter how successful the show is even though they’re getting their own money back. That’s been going on for decades.

This is all a roundabout way to say, only in the highest profile disasters is something ever cancelled for “money”. Usually it’s something else, and much less rational: this exec doesn’t like this show for their personal resume, the show is successful and entering its fourth season but the showrunner wants a raise that an exec doesn’t want to sign off on lest other showrunners hear and demand a raise, an exec thinks starting a new show will demonstrate “leadership”, another exec hates another producer, the streaming service decided it doesn’t want to host one of the few-WGA animated shows (this is what happened to Bojack Horseman), etc.

https://www.languageunlimited.org/englishlessonhollywoodacco...

Instead of shutting it down and laying everyone off, they could spin it out to be not-a-business though.

Not everyone is an investor in an industry they don't care anything about - somebody who loves cycling could own and run GCN without needing to beat treasuries

Of the people your suggesting to no layoff, how many of them are going to make that transition to working for a not-a-business? Doesn't seem like a smart move.

I'm also not sure how much experience you have with creating content for some form of broadcast or how much experience you have running the broadcast side of things. Some one has to schedule the content to avoid dead air. Someone has to set up the ad breaks so that you can hopefully monetize it. Someone has to put the content in the correct format for the streaming system to use. Someone has to wrangle/manage all of that wonderful metadata about that content so someone wonder WTF this channel is about can have a clue. What backend are you using to do the streaming? Who's going to maintain that when some intern at the cloud provider you're using runs an update to a core router?

yeah, i might be to close to this as i've been around linear channels for streaming and back to bouncing the feed to a satellite for distribution. it is irksome to read someone's "just do it for free" like it's no big deal

Hobby/lifestyle/passion businesses are interesting. People will basically run them at-cost (or even a loss) because they enjoy what they do.

Officially reasoning is consolidation to less streaming services. Earnings were not stated. The commentators said they are sorry and it was an executive decision.

They still stream all races on Discovery+ for Europe. Except for America, Canada and Swiss. I’m not sure of UK and Australia.

The news is still made. Available on YouTube with adds.

Documentaries were depublished. Not available anymore. So if they did cost too much they will not earn any money.

The app was also deleted. Including posts, comments and community. I only lately recognized that the website provided detailed documentation aside to races with graphs of courses, elevation and further notes. That’s a way more info than 160 characters aside of a thumbnail.

I’ve probably ten times more content available. Pimple Doctor Why? What? No. But thanks. I assume cycling fans don’t pay 800 EUR a year like the soccer people. We’re cycling too much ;)

Don't worry, Star Trek in the Discovery Channel style will be fine. The Discovery Channel is still all about exploration and learning, so it will be a good fit, right?

> And executives at Warner Bros Discovery appear to have learned absolutely nothing from the experience [of AT&T acquiring and divesting Warner].

> The New York Times indicates that Warner Bros Discovery boss David Zaslav is in early talks to merge with yet another company, this time Paramount (CBS). These mergers provide absolutely no real benefit to the broader world; they exist exclusively so the fail upward brunchlords in charge can nab giant tax breaks and put “savvy dealmaker” on their resumes.

I agree that there might not be broader value, though there is an argument that Paramount and Warner both need to be bigger to compete with Netflix and Disney. What I disagree with is that this is just a move to boost there resumes. This is completely different from the AT&T deal. These are similar companies trailing the market leader, so there are benefits beyond empire building.

I'm grateful that someone is at least doing the proper framing of these monstrous acts. Zaslav is a cancer.

50,900 job cuts from the last merger…

At what point are these companies just throwing themselves in the garbage for acquisitions to come out as a smaller company?

Why even merge if it means cutting so much staff and projects and output that you didn’t even grow?

The “last two” it’s referring to are AT&T and Discovery. I’m not sure why the headline calls out just those two; it’s not like the merger with AOL wasn’t disastrous as well.

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