AT&T is preparing to spin off its entertainment business, WarnerMedia, and merge it with competitor Discovery, Bloomberg reported yesterday.
What's included?
-
WarnerMedia is home to storied
brands including CNN, Cartoon Network, Warner Bros. film studios, and
HBO, plus streaming service HBO Max, which celebrates its first birthday
next week.
-
Discovery Inc., in addition to its
namesake TV channel, offers a variety of lifestyle and reality brands:
Animal Planet, Oprah Winfrey Network, Food Network, TLC, and
HGTV...brands you can also catch on its three-month-old streaming
platform, Discovery+.
If the deal
pans out—and it could be announced as soon as today—that's a pretty
compelling content catalogue to stand up against streaming heavyweights
Netflix and Disney+, which boast 200+ million and 100+ million
subscribers, respectively. Combined, WarnerMedia and Discovery would be
worth $150 billion, the Financial Times estimates.
It's a U-turn for AT&T
WarnerMedia
was created just three years ago through AT&T's $85 billion
acquisition of Time Warner. The deal was overshadowed by a multiyear
fight with the Department of Justice, which sued to block the
acquisition on antitrust grounds, but lost.
So why's AT&T changing course now?
CEO John
Stankey, who assumed the top job last summer, has been offloading some
of AT&T's less profitable divisions. The company is paying down
hefty debt loads from recent acquisitions and, in an attempt to catch up
to leading wireless providers Verizon and T-Mobile, making expensive
investments in 5G and fiber optics.
While AT&T has funneled resources into production for HBO Max, it's gotten rid of some other media assets.
- In December, AT&T sold anime streamer Crunchyroll to Sony.
- In February, it reached a deal with TPG to spin off DirecTV operations.
Big picture:
Owning distribution and content is tough, and a WarnerMedia-Discovery
merger "would underscore the difficulty telecom companies like AT&T
and Verizon...have had finding a payoff from their media operations,"
Bloomberg writes. Verizon recently sold its media assets to Apollo Global Management for $5 billion.
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