Rates were low, the cost of servicing $14 billion in debt was $0.

CEO's had the company take the debt on, paid themselves fat bonuses and hoped that the little people downstairs would invent something new that would save the company.

Yeah. Episodic streaming content has been incredible for the past few years, but now TV studio execs realized that indiscriminately pumping money into everything, all the time, inexplicably, isn't a good business move! So they've just started firing the big staffs they've picked up and cancelling projects. Because, when you realize you've been making irrational moves, the answer isn't trying to make rational moves– it's making equally irrational moves in the opposite direction.

The CBS Viacom merger was a cynical plan from the very beginning. It even drew shareholder lawsuits which they ultimately had to settle. The writing was on the wall as early as 2015, though, when the company started restructuring several core businesses in moves that I saw at the time as "thinly veiled cash grabs."

During a time when they could have been making deeper investments in these business and capturing large parts of a growing media market they completely ceded the space and any expertise they had in it all to pad their own paper value. Immediately after the merger they lost a lot of licensing revenue because they drastically overestimated the value of the corporate assets they cherry picked for themselves.

I wonder if that's why they started forcing people to create accounts on PlutoTV. They must be looking to make money selling people's data.

You betcha.

Tech people grift LA types...

No, never, not us...