\n\t\u201cThe biggest challenge to take away from past M&A in media is the environment moves really quickly, and so you want to get these deals done as quickly as possible to be able to implement a strategy. If you wait two years, or two-and-a-half years \u2026 the ecosystem\u2019s changed a lot,\u201d said Naveen Sarma, Managing Director and Sector Lead for U.S. Media and Telecom at giant ratings agency S&P Global.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cWe\u2019ve seen a lot of deals not work out because of things like that. The ecosystem moves faster than companies are able to react,\u201d he said during a Q&A at the UBS media conference in New York when asked to opine on the current battle for Warner Bros. Discovery<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tWBD, which put itself up for sale in October, inked a deal Friday to sell its studios and HBO Max to Netflix<\/a> for $27.75 in cash and stock. Paramount<\/a>, which had six successive bids for all of WBD rebuffed, announced a hostile tender offer Monday morning of $30 in cash for the whole company. WBD has ten days to respond. \u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWall Street and Hollywood have been gaming out the scenarios with Sarma telling the UBS audience that Netflix \u201chas a lot more capacity \u2026 and they\u2019d be able to increase a bid if they need to. And we\u2019ll see what Paramount does. They certainly have a lot less capacity to do that, although \u2026 if it\u2019s David Ellison reaching back to his dad and asking for more stock, that\u2019s more capacity.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tDad is Larry Ellison, Oracle co-founder and one of the world\u2019s richest people. The equity portion of the Paramount bid includes three Middle East sovereign wealth funds and Jared Kushner\u2019s investment firm Affinity Partners. But the Ellison Trust is backstopping it all, meaning financing is guaranteed. <\/p>\n \n\tThere\u2019s less risk to Netflix in waiting it out than Paramount, notes one Wall Streeter, given the latter\u2019s exposure to declining linear television. \u201cIn two years, Netflix will still pretty much be Netflix,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \n\tBut David Ellison has been pounding the table with assurances that Paramount has a fast and secure path to approval. The Department of Justice will be reviewing the deal. He\u2019s been laying out his case aggressively over the past 24 hours in the public tender offer, at a press conference, on CNBC and in well attended private meetings at UBS, although he backed out of a previously scheduled main stage Q&A. He\u2019s trying to convince investors to tender their shares. There\u2019s a January 8 deadline to do that but it can be extended.<\/p>\n \n\tGiant streamer Netflix plus HBO Max poses obvious antitrust issues, Ellison says. Netflix says streaming video is a much broader market with rivals like YouTube, TikTok and more. Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters appeared on Monday <\/a>at UBS, which was particularly well timed this year, to talk up their offer and said they are confident it will close.<\/p>\n \n\tObservers, including Candle Media\u2019s Kevin Mayer, the former top Disney executive and TikTok CEO who spoke earlier today,<\/a> don\u2019t anticipate smooth sailing, however, but, as Mayer, said \u201cfireworks.\u201d <\/p>\n \n\tThat could mean escalating offers, a Paramount lawsuit, a proxy fight, or all three.<\/p>\n \n\tSarma was among the first to publicly call out risks to Paramount\u2019s credit-worthiness <\/a>at the same UBS event in late 2023 before it was acquired by Skydance. A year ago, he predicted upheaval at the company<\/a>, which had inked but not closed the deal. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe biggest challenge to take away from past M&A in media is the environment moves really quickly, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":338203,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[64,63,134,435,14627,2008,427,6142],"class_list":{"0":"post-338202","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-netflix","12":"tag-paramount","13":"tag-sp","14":"tag-tv","15":"tag-warner-bros-discovery"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338202\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/338203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}