00:00 Speaker A

And I’m curious as a veteran of cable in particular, what you think of the cable side of the assets of Warner Brothers, right? Both what happens to them and sort of what, how to how to monetize them properly at a time when it’s sort of a, a deteriorating asset.

00:33 Speaker B

Mhm. Well, there’s no doubt tremendous changes have happened already in the marketplace and cable networks, which were the disruptor back when uh I was running cable networks uh USA and sci-fi and so forth. I you know, we were the disruptors in the industry and I think probably the best outcome was the bundling of the services uh throughout the cable infrastructure, the cable industry. Um, you know, it was the

01:14 Speaker B

secret sauce of the industry really to build out many different networks on uh a a business model that that really worked. People then felt, oh, that got expensive and streaming came up and Netflix has led all the way on that. Um, it’s now getting to be quite expensive because streaming networks were, you know, five, $6 a month. Now they’re $20 a month a piece or $39 a month. They’re, you know, now it’s adding up for people a great deal.

01:54 Speaker B

And I think that um while these assets from Warner Brothers uh and Discovery are value very valuable, uh they have a long life uh and it’s a library value that and the ability to work with the franchises that are so strong, they’ve one of the strongest in the industry for a long time that and Disney. And it is an interesting that Disney has just jumped in with ChaT, um in Sora and making their animation characters, which are extremely valuable to that company, uh available through an AI product.

02:45 Speaker B

So it’s really mass changes are going on and I don’t think that it’s just Netflix and Paramount going to be in the mixed here. I think there are many other companies that could make an offer for the cable networks including CNN or including those are not CNN.

03:19 Speaker B

And they still have value. Now, cable networks licensed a lot of the programming from others, from the studios and so forth. So they don’t have the rights, uh, you know, longer term, uh, to offer to either one of these companies. They’ll, you know, they revert to the original producers of them. So it’s a, it’s a massive change on the business of entertainment.

03:52 Speaker A

Right. There’s no question.

03:54 Speaker B

And at the same time, really live sports are what’s driving a lot of the streaming, the tech companies today, uh to bid for sports because that’s basically what people want to to uh you know, to watch in real time.