This was off topic in another thread, thought to repost it here....
With regard to Paramount's numbers:
While growing subs is good, it's not the whole story. Especially when there are free ad-supported tiers in the mix or soon to come which make sub-counting meaningless. The trades have been repeating the mantra that Wall Street is not paying much attention to subs any more, but to income deficit/surplus.
And with Paramount+, they're operating at a big loss and they say the peak of that loss is still to come in 2023 and they won't say when they expect to be profitable.
Compare that to D+ in which Disney says will hit profitability in 2024.
All this to say: Paramount+ wouldn't be averse to a buyout. It doesn't have a corporate Daddy to fund years of deficits like most of the other streamers have.
Paramount Global CFO Naveen Chopra indicated streaming losses would total about $1.8 billion this year, higher than Wall Street expected, but stuck to the company’s target of peak DTC losses …
deadline.com
Paramount Global said Thursday that Top Gun: Maverick powered a 126% surge in filmed entertainment sales last quarter, surpassing Titanic to become the studio’s biggest domestic release of al…
deadline.com
Streamers with corporate sugar Daddies:
- Disney+/Hulu/ESPN (ABC, Disney Channels, 20th Century, et al.)
- Peacock (NBC/Universal Comcast)
- Amazon Prime (Recently purchased the orphan, Epix streamer, with MGM library)
- Apple TV
- YouTube TV (Google)
- Tubi (Fox)
'Orphans' without corporate Daddies:
- Netflix
- HBO/Warner Bros/Discovery (AT&T was HBO/Warners 'Daddy' and sold it to Discovery)
- Paramount+ (CBS, Paramount/Viacom merger)
- Starz (Lionsgate/Summit) -- actively looking for a Daddy
- Roku
- a whole bunch of ad-supported freebie channels and/or rental channels (like Vudu)
The 'orphans' can be in deficit spending only for so long hoping to eventually become profitable either by being good, or outlasting the others and 'winning' the Streamer Wars. The orphans are the ones most likely to wind up being 'adopted' by the streamers with corporate Daddies, or, by a some non-media corporation that wants to get into the media business (e.g, IBM, or Tesla, or Meta, or NVidia).
Sony is the only big studio 'free agent' uncoupled to any streamer by corporate ties. It currently has a deal to use Netflix as Pay Window 1, and then D+ as Pay Window 2.
variety.com
www.nytimes.com
www.indiewire.com
www.slashfilm.com
www.marketwatch.com
finance.yahoo.com
