Rumor: HBO Max may be folding into Discovery+

MajesticLion

MajesticLion

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A lot of moving pieces to this. Worth reading to grasp the full scope of the wilful stupidity involved here. Edited excerpts(board post limits) posted here.




www.nytimes.com

Was This $100 Billion Deal the Worst Merger Ever?

At Time Warner, executives saw AT&T as just a “big phone company from Texas.” At AT&T, they thought Hollywood would play by their rules. That combination led to strategic miscalculation unrivaled in recent corporate history.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com


Was This $100 Billion Deal the Worst Merger Ever?

At Time Warner, executives saw AT&T as just a “big phone company from Texas.” At AT&T, they thought Hollywood would play by their rules. That combination led to strategic miscalculation unrivaled in recent corporate history.


Soon after a sweeping courtroom victory in 2018 cleared the way for AT&T’s $100 billion takeover of Time Warner, John Stankey, AT&T’s chief operating officer and the newly anointed chief executive of Warner Media, summoned his top Warner Media executives to a meeting at the Time Warner Center off Columbus Circle.

They included Kevin Tsujihara, the head of the Warner Bros. movie studio; Richard Plepler, the head of HBO; and Jeff Zucker, CNN’s chief executive. Mr. Stankey handed them a typed document titled “Operating Cadence and Style,” and sat there while they read it. The memo was two pages, single-spaced, and the silence stretched for what seemed an excruciating length.

The document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, told them how to approach and interact with their new boss. Accustomed as they were to emailing, texting or calling Time Warner’s previous chief executive, Jeff Bewkes, pretty much any time of the day or night, such a directive had never proved necessary. Now their dismay mounted.
Among Mr. Stankey’s dictates: 30 minutes was the “default” length for meetings, Saturdays were reserved for “quality time” with his family, and he expected to be home for dinner by 6:30 or 7. “My routine is important to me,” Mr. Stankey wrote.

Although “I really, really don’t like formal presentations and PowerPoint, I do like brief bullet outlines and references to working documents,” he elaborated. “I prefer to reserve more formal slide decks for moments of seminal importance. I will invest to get messages right and articulated when it counts and has the opportunity to move an issue of significance.”
Few details were overlooked: “Digital documents are preferred,” Mr. Stankey wrote, “with PDF format the minimum standard.”

Curiously, given their presence in a 12th-floor conference room, he added: “I’m not a big fan of meetings. A good meeting is purposeful, has a small number of responsible participants and closes with decisions being made.”

When everyone finished reading, Mr. Stankey asked if he had made himself clear. No one said anything. But afterward, there was a flurry of profanity-laced texts.

Less than four years later, all three Warner executives had been replaced.
And then Mr. Stankey bailed.

​

How badly could it go?​

When AT&T’s bold megadeal to buy Time Warner was announced in October 2016, combining AT&T’s broadband and wireless networks with Time Warner content, many analysts and investors cheered. They loved the promise of cutting out the cable middleman and delivering entertainment directly to people’s TVs, laptops and phones.
With Hillary Clinton seemingly poised to be the next president, the regulatory landscape looked favorable. While the AT&T executives acknowledged that they knew next to nothing about Hollywood, they had proven entertainment executives running Time Warner’s divisions. They thought they could bring AT&T’s vast storehouse of consumer data — even artificial intelligence — to the notoriously uncertain task of greenlighting movies and TV shows.
AT&T and its chief executive, Randall Stephenson, were widely admired as masters of consolidation. AT&T itself was the product of many successful takeovers, starting with the regional Bell telephone companies.
As Gary Ginsberg, Time Warner’s head of communications, recently recalled: “This was AT&T! How badly could they screw it up?”
Less than four years after the merger, AT&T abandoned its grand initiative. It spun off its Warner Media assets and ceded management control to Discovery. The new company, Warner Bros. Discovery, took on $43 billion of AT&T’s debt, and AT&T shareholders kept 71 percent of the company, a stake worth less than $20 billion. That amounts to a loss of about $47 billion for AT&T shareholders, based on AT&T’s $109 billion valuation of the deal at the time it was announced.

An AT&T spokesman, Fletcher Cook, took issue with that calculation. He said that the value of the deal at closing was $100.3 billion, and that The Times’s analysis failed to account for the sale of Warner assets and cash flows generated while AT&T owned Warner Media. “Under any informed measure, our ownership of Warner Media was accretive,” he said.


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MajesticLion

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AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner is hardly the first deal to have gone disastrously awry — Time Warner’s own merger with AOL in 2000 led to $160 billion in write-offs. But few corporate mergers have stirred up the passions, seething resentments and finger-pointing as AT&T’s short-lived ownership of Time Warner did.

In the eyes of former Time Warner executives, a vibrant culture of creative energy and success nurtured over decades was destroyed in months. The recent cancellations of the ambitious news streaming platform CNN+, the nearly finished $90 million film “Batgirl” and the critically acclaimed HBO series “Westworld” have left Hollywood reeling — and suggest how far Warner management under AT&T had run off the rails.

Mr. Cook said Mr. Stankey, now the chief executive of AT&T, and others at the company had no interest in revisiting this subject and declined to be interviewed. But I was able to interview more than two dozen people involved in the merger and its aftermath, some on many occasions and over many hours, including both former chief executives, Mr. Bewkes of Time Warner and Mr. Stephenson of AT&T.
While many spoke on background, quite a few agreed to be quoted, offering a rare look inside the aftermath of a once-celebrated merger. I discovered that passions still run strong on both sides of the AT&T/Time Warner — and now Discovery — divide.
In a statement to The Times, AT&T acknowledged the ill will it had left behind. “A fundamental and dramatic repositioning of an entrenched corporate culture — multiple corporate cultures actually — will certainly leave broken glass, disenfranchised individuals and disagreements on the difficult path to reinvention,” Mr. Cook said.

AT&T’s path to reinvention is continuing. Months before it sold Warner Media to Discovery, it spun off the satellite broadcaster DirecTV, another prong in AT&T’s media strategy, with a loss to shareholders of about $49 billion.

By The Times’s calculation, between the Time Warner and DirecTV deals AT&T has squandered close to $100 billion.
Now it may be Discovery’s turn. After several quarters of weak financial results, Warner Bros. Discovery’s market capitalization was less than $27 billion this past week — a stunning loss of nearly $23 billion since the new company began trading in April.
Discovery in part blamed AT&T’s mismanagement for the grim results and, in the latest twist, investigated allegations that AT&T engaged in questionable accounting tactics to inflate the projections on which the value of the Warner assets was based.

...


A year later, in the summer of 2016, Mr. Ginsberg, Time Warner’s head of communications, had breakfast with Peter Chernin, his former boss at News Corp. and a trusted adviser to Mr. Stephenson, at a cafe in Menemsha on Martha’s Vineyard. Mr. Chernin asked Mr. Ginsberg what he thought Time Warner’s price might be. “We’d need $105 to $115 a share,” Mr. Ginsberg suggested, pretty much off the top of his head. Mr. Chernin didn’t blanch.
As soon as breakfast was over, Mr. Ginsberg called Mr. Bewkes. “Are you sitting down?” he asked. “Because I’ve got some incredible news that will stun you.”

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MajesticLion

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‘They don’t own the company yet’​

The two companies announced their deal on Oct. 22, 2016. Neither AT&T nor Time Warner management was worried about antitrust or other regulatory issues since vertical combinations — mergers of buyers and suppliers, rather than competitors — were almost never challenged on antitrust grounds. No such case had been litigated in 40 years.
They had failed to reckon with the populist skepticism about big mergers or Donald J. Trump’s hostility to established media, especially CNN, which he repeatedly denounced as “fake news.” Mr. Trump’s ire was especially intense toward CNN’s chief executive, Jeff Zucker, ignoring (or forgetting) that it was Mr. Zucker, as head of NBC Entertainment, who put “The Apprentice” into NBC’s prime-time lineup and made Mr. Trump a TV star.
The proposed megadeal was one of the few issues — perhaps the only issue — to instantly unite the political right and left, with Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee for president, and the liberal senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren unlikely allies in opposing it.
With the unexpected election of Mr. Trump in November, AT&T realized it had a problem. In January 2017, the company hired the president-elect’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, paying him $50,000 a month to advise it on, among other topics, the Time Warner merger, even though Mr. Cohen had no known antitrust expertise.
The move appeared to yield immediate results. (Mr. Cohen did not respond to a request for comment.)
Just days after Mr. Cohen was hired, Mr. Stephenson invited Mr. Bewkes to join him for a Trump Tower meeting with Mr. Trump, along with Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and adviser Stephen K. Bannon. Mr. Bewkes declined.

“I wasn’t going to talk about our coverage or oversight of any of our companies, and sure as hell not with a politician,” Mr. Bewkes recalled. “We covered these people.”
Mr. Stephenson visited Trump Tower on Jan. 12. Mr. Stephenson recalled that Mr. Trump had brought up the subject of CNN and attacked Mr. Zucker before stopping himself with the realization that he shouldn’t be talking about CNN. Mr. Stephenson said he had offered no response.

Mr. Trump kept up his Twitter diatribe against CNN and Mr. Zucker. But on June 22, Mr. Stephenson visited the White House along with other chief executives, and Mr. Trump was surprisingly effusive in his praise for the AT&T chairman, saying publicly that he had done “really a top job.”


Mr. Stephenson’s warm presidential reception was shortly followed by a visit to Time Warner by Larry Solomon, the head of corporate communications for AT&T. Mr. Solomon told Mr. Ginsberg that he was there to give him a “heads up” that “we’re going to fire Jeff Zucker,” Mr. Ginsberg recalled.
“Why?” Mr. Ginsberg asked. CNN was thriving, generating more than $1 billion in annual profit for Time Warner.
Mr. Solomon responded that MSNBC had overtaken CNN in the ratings.
Mr. Ginsberg didn’t buy that. “What does that matter?” he asked. CNN had never been driven primarily by ratings.

As soon as Mr. Solomon left, Mr. Ginsberg got Mr. Bewkes on the phone, Mr. Ginsberg recalled. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “They want to fire Zucker.”
“Stop right there,” Mr. Bewkes responded. “They don’t own the company yet, and they may never own the company.”

Mr. Solomon, now retired from AT&T, denied having any such exchange with Mr. Ginsberg and called the account a fabrication. Mr. Stephenson also said he had never suggested that Mr. Zucker be fired and rebutted the idea that AT&T had made any promises to Mr. Trump.
“Anyone who says otherwise is categorically wrong or making it up,” Mr. Stephenson said.
On June 27, just five days after Mr. Stephenson’s White House visit, Mr. Trump tweeted, after CNN retracted a story on Mr. Trump and Russia, that CNN was “looking at big management changes” and that its ratings were “way down!” — pretty much the same message Mr. Ginsberg had heard from Mr. Solomon.
Mr. Ginsberg was stunned. He confronted Mr. Solomon: “How did Trump know this?” Mr. Ginsberg thought the answer was obvious, but Mr. Solomon insisted that Mr. Stephenson hadn’t promised the president anything in return for Mr. Trump’s support of the merger.
“Of course they weren’t so stupid as to say, ‘Trump wants this, and if you do it he’ll do what we want,’” Mr. Bewkes recalled. What AT&T wanted at the time was for the administration to approve the merger. “But Randall was always probing me. ‘What do you think of our coverage?’ ‘Were our reporters being too hard on the White House and Trump?’ ‘Should Zucker be replaced?’ It was nothing explicit, but I got the drift.”

Mr. Stephenson acknowledged that he had discussed the anti-Trump tenor of CNN’s reporting with Mr. Bewkes. “If you ask me personally, would I have liked to have seen CNN’s coverage be more moderate? Yes, that would have been helpful,” Mr. Stephenson said.

Mr. Bewkes was adamant that the news division was independent, and that he’d do nothing to interfere with its coverage. He would not fire Mr. Zucker. If he did, “all your journalists will resign,” he warned Mr. Stephenson. “They’ll tell everyone to write stories about what you’re doing. Nobody will bring you a script in Hollywood if you become part of the dark empire.”

...

Any efforts to appease Mr. Trump went nowhere. AT&T later acknowledged that its payments to Mr. Cohen had reached $600,000. By the time Mr. Cohen came under criminal investigation for payments to the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels, and the AT&T payments were revealed, Mr. Stephenson said hiring Mr. Cohen had been a “big mistake.”

At that point, Mr. Zucker probably had more job security than anyone at Time Warner.
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wire28

wire28

Blade said what up
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humminbird said:
lol someone hacked into my account again. I had to completely change my emails this time.
I go see what they were watching and it was game of thrones :laff:
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hopefully when they are absorbed by discovery plus, pesky issues like this are eliminated.

Everyone I talk to is getting anxious they are ready for the merge and for there to be some quality options available to watch alongside 90 day fiancé and I love a mommas boy.
 
daemonova

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CNN on Thursday laid off hundreds of staffers and made other sweeping changes that CEO Chris Lictht admitted was a "gut punch" to the network. Among the biggest changes: All live programming on HLN will be halted starting on Dec. 6.


Licht singled out the work of Robin Meade, the "Morning Express" anchor who has been with HLN since 2001. In place of her show, CNN's longtime sister channel will instead simulcast "CNN This Morning." HLN crime programming will move under Warner Bros. Discovery Networks and will be led by Kathleen Finch as it merges with ID.

"I want to take a moment to thank Robin Meade -- she is not only an exceptionally popular anchor, but also one of the longest-running morning hosts in history," Licht wrote in a staff memo outlining the layoffs and restructuring the outlet is undergoing. "I know the HLN audience will miss her and the other HLN talent."

CNN did not immediately respond to TheWrap's request for clarification on if Meade will stay at the network following this change.

Among other on-air talent that has been let go in the latest round of staff cuts is Chris Cillizza, Alison Kosik, Martin Savidge, Alexandra Field, and Sonia Moghe, according to CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy, who said that the number of layoffs was in the "hundreds
 
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