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AT&T announces $43B deal to merge WarnerMedia with Discovery
- rektide 5y agoI used to work across from the Discovery building in Silver Spring Maryland, right across the Washington DC line. I have some better photos, but not sure how to share, of the day they took down the signs. Head-count was already way down, & basically the signature business of Silver Spring decided to take part of their work force & relocate to NYC[1]. Worth mentioning some of the brands in these networks. WarnerMedia: CNN, Warner Brothers/WB, TBS, Cartoon Networ, TNT, HBOmax Discovery: TLC, Food Network, HGTV, Animal Planet, Discovery channel [1] https://wjla.com/news/local/silver-spring-discovery-headquarters-sign https://wjla.com/news/local/silver-spring-discovery-headquar...
- MikeUt 5y agoThey should have been broken up a decade ago. That they are instead allowed to merge further is a travesty. In 1983, 90% of US media was controlled by 50 companies; as of 2011, 90% was controlled by just 6 companies and in 2017 the number was 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownership#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownersh...
- CarelessExpert 5y agoThe 55B debt load of this new entity is pretty astounding and makes this look a lot like a PE firm deal. Given that content production is so dang expensive, they're gonna be highly motivated to generate profits to deal with that debt. This makes me think this merger would be followed by a rapid sell-off of low performing assets to try and pay that down a bit.