Warner Bros. Discovery, the owner of HBO, CNN, and other streaming and studio businesses, said Tuesday it is putting itself up for sale.<\/p>\n
In a press release, the company announced “a review of strategic alternatives to maximize shareholder value,” which is Wall Street speak for a sale. WBD said it had recently received “unsolicited interest” from “multiple parties for both the entire company and Warner Bros.” alone.<\/p>\n
WBD houses a variety of media businesses, from cable networks and news outlets to popular franchises, movie studios and streaming platforms. The company also holds the rights to broadcast a range of sports internationally, from the Olympics and the French Open in Europe to the Premier League in the UK.<\/p>\n
The company said that while it shops itself around, it will continue to work on the previously announced split of its cable networks<\/a> from its streaming and studio businesses.<\/p>\n Warner Bros. Discovery shared surged on the news, rising more than 10% at the start of trading.<\/p>\n The move comes as the media industry has continued a years-long consolidation effort sparked in part by changes in consumer habits, most notably the rise of internet-based competitors such as Netflix and the decline in cable TV viewership.<\/p>\n Any deal for part, or all, of the company would be a sizable one. As of Monday’s close of trading, Warner Bros. Discovery had a market value of more than $45 billion. It also carries billions of dollars of debt on its balance sheet.<\/p>\n WBD’s studio business could be attractive to a streaming or tech company. It has released a number of recent box office hits and holds the rights to Harry Potter and to DC Comics heroes such as Superman, as well as other popular franchises.<\/p>\n In September, rival Paramount Global was preparing a bid<\/a> for all of WBD, however that appeared to stall in recent weeks.<\/p>\n Tuesday’s news injects fresh uncertainty into Warner Bros. Discovery’s business, which in recent years has gone through a series of changes. <\/p>\n In the early 2000s, when it known as Time Warner, the company was transformed by a string of deals that included spinning off Time Warner Cable and Time magazine. In 2014, the company faced a takeover bid from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which was later withdrawn.<\/p>\n AT&T acquired Time Warner in 2016 for $85 billion, merging it with some TV assets that it already owned. But that deal faced a years long battle with the Justice Department, which sought to block it on anti-trust grounds.AT&T ended up spinning off the company in another deal, which set the stage for a 2022 merger with Discovery. <\/p>\n In June, Warner Bros. Discovery announced its latest deal, which will ultimately cleaved off HBO and its HBO Max streaming platform, along with Warner Bros. studio and DC Comics into a new company.<\/p>\n WBD’s latest announcements closely mirror the moves of other major media companies. <\/p>\n Earlier this year, Skydance acquired CBS owner Paramount<\/a>, while in late 2024 Comcast announced it would spin off many of its cable networks including CNBC and MSNBC <\/a>into a new company called Versant. <\/p>\n Under Comcast’s spin off plan, the Peacock streaming platform, Bravo, and NBC broadcast network would remain part of Comcast, which owns NBC News parent company NBCUniversal. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Warner Bros. Discovery, the owner of HBO, CNN, and other streaming and studio businesses, said Tuesday it is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":136267,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[265],"tags":[18,117,19,17,128],"class_list":{"0":"post-136266","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-tv"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136266\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}