Warner Bros Discovery Poised To Sell Off Music, Movie Catalogs Because Megamergers Are Stupid And Pointless
from the growth-for-growth's-sake dept
We just got done noting how the AT&T—>Time Warner—>Warner Bros Discovery mergers just keep on demonstrating the absolutely pointlessness of most media mergers.
The combined companies spent hundreds of billions of dollars on elaborate, costly acquisitions that never got close to delivering the kind of “synergies” dealmakers promised. Instead, the string of mergers resulted in tens of thousands of layoffs, the death of numerous popular brands, lots of underpaid and pissed off creatives, and an end product, “Max,” that’s notably shittier than when it all began.
(And that’s before we even touch on the circus that has been CNN’s recent history).
Last week we noted how the brain trust behind the Warner Bros Discovery deal had now begun cannibalizing the company’s future by licensing “HBO” content to streaming competitors like Netflix to make an extra buck. Now there are rumblings that Warner Discovery CEO David Zaslav is looking to offload much of the movie and music licensing rights the company spent all that money to acquire:
The windfall from such a sale — coming at the top of a still-booming market for music catalogs — would help the company to pay down a $49.5 billion debt.
Gosh, where did that debt originate?
It remains absolutely comical that when media reporters cover this idiot parade they fail repeatedly to acknowledge that the problems are 100% the fault of incompetent executives and mindless consolidation. Instead, the resulting chaos is either framed as causation free, or the fault of some kind of ambiguous externalities.
Again, the purported purpose of the entire merger, starting with AT&T’s costly, also disastrous $200 billion acquisition of DirecTV and Time Warner, was to create a modern streaming video and advertising juggernaut. Instead, we got a giant piece of shit, a ton of layoffs, a mountain of debt, endless animosity, the death of the iconic HBO brand, a writer’s strike, and “FBoy island.”
Guys like Zaslav grab some tax breaks, massive executive comp, and unearned credibility as a “savvy dealmaker” thanks to a press that oddly can’t acknowledge the pointlessness and harm of this kind of mindless consolidation. The “growth for growth’s sake” and “acquisitions for acquisitions sake” mindset pleases short term Wall Streeters, but the end result is uniformly harmful for everyone in the chain.
Nothing seems keen on demonstrating this more than the AT&T, Time Warner, and Discovery idiot supernova. The question now is: will anybody in America actually learn anything from the experience?
Filed Under: cable tv, competition, david zaslav, layoffs, media consolidation, mergers, streaming video, tv, writers' strike
Companies: time warner, warner brothers discovery