Time Warner Discovery Merger’s Latest Victim: Cartoon Network’s Entire Web Presence
from the masterful-mismanagement dept
You might recall that AT&T’s $200 billion acquisition of Time Warner and DirecTV was supposed to transform the telecom giant into a modern internet video advertising superpower. Instead, after a massive amount of debt and endless bumbling, AT&T wound up laying off more than 50,000 people, closing a bunch of popular brands (like Mad Magazine), and selling what was left to Discovery.
The executives at Discovery have proven no less bumbling, and after firing more people and ruining a bunch of additional services (like HBO), the company saw its stock tank last week after having to take a $9.1 billion write down on the value of its entire TV division.
Like other mindlessly merging media monstrosities completely out of ideas (Paramount/CBS is engaged in similar cannibalization), Warner Bros Discovery is now looking to miraculously cut costs to reduce massive debt created by its pointlessly doomed merger.
At Paramount, that meant the complete erasure of both Comedy Central’s online footprint and the entire MTV News journalism archive. At Warner Bros Discovery, that most recently meant the deletion of Cartoon Network’s entire online presence (without any warning, we should add):
“Warner Bros. Discovery this week pulled the entire contents of cartoonnetwork.com offline — redirecting visitors to a landing page on Max, its subscription-streaming service, encouraging fans to sign up to watch their favorite Cartoon Network shows. The shuttering of the site appears to have happened Thursday, Aug. 8.”
At the same time users are losing features and history, Max is slathering their products with new ads and restrictions, while endlessly raising prices on a streaming product that’s of lower quality than before the entire saga began.
These mergers were supposed to usher forth a wave of amazing synergies and create a new media juggernaut. Instead they’ve resulted in just endless annoyance and chaos. And the executives in charge of them, like fail upward Time Warner brunchlord David Zaslav, saw accountability in the form of massive compensation packages utterly untethered from any sort of actual competency.
These brunchlords are purely extractive; they don’t care about customers, employees, history, or much of anything else. After mismanaging their companies through the cord cutting revolution they’re looking for quick mergers, a short-lived stock boost, a tax break, and a fat payout before they’re off to the next company to do the same thing, financially incentivized to learn nothing from experience.
Their mismanagement is treated by the business press not as bumbling incompetence, but as some kind of cold but cleverly necessary mathematics. All the problems are somehow caused by ambiguous externalities. Whether pointless consolidation at the hands of raging incompetents is at the heart of the problem isn’t even something most in the business press feels its within their purview to contemplate.
Filed Under: brunchlord, cartoon network, comedy central, cord cutting, media, mtv, streaming, video
Companies: cartoon network, warner bros. discovery
Comments on “Time Warner Discovery Merger’s Latest Victim: Cartoon Network’s Entire Web Presence”
Congressional Hearings?
We really need to do congressional hearings about this, if only to ensure that this stupidity hasn’t spread to other, more important, industries.
Call me a boomer, but I don’t remember when CN was good after the era from the early 2000s to the Adventure Time-Steven Universe period. It’s Ben 10 Reboot and Teen Titans GO-level shlock all the way down.
Re: Fair enough
If you can let the writers know which media companies you think are worth saving then they’ll stop doing this unless it’s something you want to watch.
🙂
Re:
Those darn kids and their… interest in being able to access content they want to watch? If they might possibly disagree with my opinions (or might agree, there’s literally no basis for any statement about content being good or bad), then all the content, especially the content I think is good, should be removed. That’ll show them for hypothetically calling me a boomer. or something
I’m going be honest here: I have absolutely no idea whatsoever where you were trying to go with this.
Re: Re:
The previous comment mentioned the “Adventure Time-Steven Universe period”, which apparently ran from about 2010 to 2018. I assume “CN” was a reference to the linear cable television network, rather than its web site.
Is it reasonable to expect “kids” to be a relevant audience after, or even within, that time period? We’re talking about people who grew up with Youtube and streaming, sitting down for 30 minutes to watch a 20-minute show… at a time not of their choosing, with minutes-long ad breaks?
I can only really imagine it happening with children too young to have their own smartphones, while at the home of people still old enough to have cable (which excludes their parents).
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Master Shake moment
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Oops I forgot I replied to you, my sorry good person. It was originally a long rant about why Adult Swim was the only thing on late night for a while. that hit critical mass and was deleted after branching out about Ax Cop and High School USA, and also now I’m realizing that Adult Swim is probably a different website? Not sure if I was complaining about the wrong thing now in hindsight but I don’t know how to edit or delete the prior message, which is ok. Plus the joke seems like it would still have potential to be funny. Later!
Re: Re:
All this new stuff is just clicks and whistles
brunchlords
They’re like vampire pigeons – strut around while sucking everything dry, shit all over the place, then fly away.
Re: Is that a real animal?
What is a vampire pigeon?
Re: Re:
It’s exactly what they described.
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Elon Musk.
I am not an Econ Major but seriously...
How exactly are walking logjams of capital good for the economy, even in theory? I simply don’t understand how capital is supposed to be effective at doing stuff when it’s captured and trapped in massive dragon-hoards in the pockets of leechlike shitheads.
Oh I’m not supposed to question this because of something-something marxist socialism something?
Okay guess I’ll lie here and keep taking it then I guess.
Re:
I’m sure the pool cleaning and golf caddy industries have never been better.
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“How exactly are walking logjams of capital good for the economy, even in theory?”
They’re not, but don’t let right wingers and rich people hear you say that.
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They’re not, but they’d been getting away with vacuuming up all that capital good under the “promise” that the wealth would trickle down from all the spending and investment power given to them. And therein lies the problem – rich people don’t spend to get more things the way you and I would. They don’t buy thousands more shirts, thousands more cars, thousands more homes – just a few more expensive ones. The bulk of the money gets filed away into bank accounts, investment portfolios, or liquid assets that can be shifted anywhere and everywhere except into the taxpayer’s office.
And then they get confused and angry why the younger generations “don’t want to work”, when they’ve done all they can to make the lower-end goods and service industries as cheap as possible to a point where living on those wages is an impossible task.
Peak Premium Content
Nothing exudes “Premium Content” like American Chopper reruns. RIP HBO.
Really?
So you want the clueless to review the stupid?
I’m not sure how that would help.
Re: Wrong place
This was supposed to be in reply to MaddTheSane. :/