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The Paramount Saga

This is why Shari is having a really hard time finding anyone to take Paramount off her hands. It's Skydance and no one else—I do not count Byron Allen as he has a great track record of never closing that one big deal. And Skydance isn't exactly a bidder I'd be bullish on.

I'd give it a few months before Shari takes Paramount off the market.

What, so she can put it back on the market when it's worth even less?

It'll take a while to put together a deal that makes sense with Skydance/Redbird, but that's likely where it ends up.
 
But as I said, Les Moonves thought the boat anchor was radio. The problem was way bigger,
Les Moonves also was opposed to merging CBS with Viacom. So Shari fired him when she took over her father's estate.

CBS is still doing fine, relative to the other divisions of the company.
 
I wonder what would have happened if one or two players (Paramount for example) "sat out" the streaming wars? For example, if CBS stuff stayed on CBS and Nickelodeon stuff was only on linear? They could keep licensing their stuff minimal to streamers (NCIS is a big hit on Netflix.)
 
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Clear Channel and CBS radio built their own streaming platforms about 15 years ago. So yeah.
Clear Channel renamed themselves after the platform they built as they saw the name "Clear Channel" to be a liability and referring to outdated technology. Who really cares about a class of AM stations?

Didn't change the fact they still own a bunch of AM stations, many of them now unsalable.
 
wonder what would have happened if one or two players (Paramount for example) "sat out" the streaming wars?
Probably not a major player anymore but Fox Entertainment (who operates what was not sold to Disney, mainly the Fox broadcast network) and their corporate sibling Fox News falls into this category.
 
So why should anyone who works in radio be surprised by any of this? Didn't the same thing happen in radio?

It's not because of bad programming, consolidation, or all the other excuses. It's media dilution.
Overextending an example of one, I've long felt that there have been simply too many viewing choices. Cable systems acquired more and more bandwidth, thus creating a vacuum to be filled. And so it was. A couple of decades later, streaming is practically infinite. The choices got to be confusing. I've settled on maybe 10 channels over time, a combination of OTA and not.

I get fewer channels with YouTube TV than I got with Comcast. I'm fine with that. (I also pay less.)

I'm not advocating a return to three networks plus PBS. I do think the sweet spot came in the latter half of the 1980s when there were specialized choices available but not so many as to be overwhelming. Thirty-six seems to be a good number, which I think is roughly what 300 MHz of CATV bandwidth could give us way back when.
 
As of today, the Warner-Discovery-Paramont merger talks are thankfully dead.

For those who were singing the praises of David Zaslav and Warner Brothers Discovery, its stock has fallen 47% in the past year and is now near a well-deserved 52-week low.

Glad they didn't because that could mean that they would merge Nickelodeon with Cartoon Network or eliminate Nickelodeon.
 
As of today, the Warner-Discovery-Paramont merger talks are thankfully dead.

For those who were singing the praises of David Zaslav and Warner Brothers Discovery, its stock has fallen 47% in the past year and is now near a well-deserved 52-week low.

David Zaslav is the Eddie Lampert of the entertainment business, and if you followed the slow burning deaths of Sears & K-Mart, Eddie is pretty much why both brands are dead brand walking and why they are down to single digit stores left in this country, Eddie killed K-Mart & Sears and David Zaslav is killing the empire Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner created with Warner Brothers Pictures as well as networks that are Ted Turner's legacy.

i wouldn't be surprised if WBD gets bought out by another company that isn't in the media business or even by a dictaor of a country (Saudi Royal Famiy), Zaslav is the first one to go.
 


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