Wall Street climbed to the edge of another milestone on Wednesday as the S&P 500 neared 5,000.
CLOSING BELL
QUARTERLY REPORT
Disney Sees Solid Quarter With Upbeat Streaming Outlook
Disney’s profit blew away forecasts although revenue fell a bit short in a key, and solid, earnings report that the company hopes will set the stage for more robust growth. Revenue was flat at $23.5 billion for Disney’s fiscal first quarter ended in December. Diluted EPS (excluding some items) was $1.22, up 23% from the year before.
At the end of the year, The Times had 10.36 million subscribers, 9.7 million of them digital-only.
BRAND CONNECTIONS
Video watched out-of-home (OOH) comprises more than one-third of programmatic OOH spend on video-enabled screens. Place Exchange, an OOH programmatic SSP, expects more investment in video as advertisers increase their use of short-form vertical video content from social campaigns on larger screens.
Wall Street analysts break down the plan by Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox to launch a joint streaming venture that has rights to the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, college football and NCAA March Madness basketball.
Exclusives
The announcement that ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros Discovery were forming a new sports streaming venture sent shares of sports-oriented Fubo spiraling downward. Fubo stock was down 25% to $1.88 a share in Wednesday morning trading.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been interviewed by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the Kremlin confirmed Wednesday. It is Putin's first interview to a Western media figure since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago.
Dish Network Chairman Charlie Ergen late last week made the rounds at the FCC. In a Feb. 2 meeting with FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, Ergen criticized one of her key pay TV initiatives: Making cable and satellite TV operators provide consumers rebates as compensation for lost programming during contract disputes.
Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch is certain that that the company’s new sports venture with Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery will be “additive” and will not threaten Fox’s still-lucrative pay-TV business. The venture was announced Tuesday and has set media tongues wagging. The topic dominated Fox’s 30-minute quarterly earnings call, which was where Murdoch made his comments, enabling execs to largely elude tougher questions about a 20% year-over-year decline in advertising revenue in the quarter.
QUARTERLY REPORT
Fox Earnings Hit By Lower Ad Revenue Last Quarter
Fox saw revenue dip 8% last quarter to $4.23 billion on weaker advertising due in part to tough comps from the year before. The fiscal second-quarter numbers hit the day after Fox with Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery set a fall launch date for joint streaming sports venture with. There’s no name or price yet for the service, which will pool the sports rights of the three media companies. CEO Lachlan Murdoch will say more on a call at 8:30 ET.
CBS News has chosen Alturo Rhymes for the newly created position of executive producer of daily news, while correspondent Jim Axelrod will be leading a new Eye on America unit. Rhymes will be responsible for “centralizing our daily Newsgathering offerings to the broadcasts, stream and digital so that we are positioned to aggressively advance stories in the news each day and ensure our best reporting flows seamlessly to all shows and platforms,” according to a note to staffers sent by CBS News President Ingrid Ciprián-Matthews.
The broadcaster’s Diamond Sports Group got tripped up by cord cutting, COVID and battles with MLB over streaming, leaving an opening for the tech giant.
On Feb. 28, 2024,Tom Skilling, longtime WGN meteorologist, and possibly one of Chicago’s most recognizable broadcast personalities, will retire. How do you celebrate the retirement of a meteorologist who’s been doing the forecasts on your station for 45 years? You go all in.
Last week, Gray Broadcasting announced it is selling its interests in the Scottsbluff, Cheyenne, and Casper television markets to Marquee Broadcasting Inc. in exchange for an FCC permit to construct a new station in Salt Lake City, Utah. Staff at the Scottsbluff station were notified late last week, and were told that Gray was not going to continue local operations.
The lawsuit accused the fast food giant of failing to live up to a pledge to increase spending with Black-owned media from 2% to 5% by the end of this year.
Fox is showing early confidence in Animal Control. The broadcast network has handed out a third season renewal to the comedy series starring Joel McHale, with the pickup arriving a month before its sophomore run debuts.
The lawsuit Carano filed with help from X, formerly Twitter, in federal court in California alleges her wrongful termination from the Star Wars galaxy Disney+ streaming series after two seasons over a post likening the treatment of American conservatives to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany.
The National Association of Broadcasters sees a link between exit fees required of pay-TV customers and carriage disputes that pit TV stations against cable and satellite TV operators. NAB, in comments filed Monday with the FCC, asserted that cable and satellite TV providers rely on the fees to benefit from losing TV stations as a result of failed contract or retransmission consent negotiations.
The three companies will each share one-third ownership in the joint venture. A name for the service and pricing will be announced later. The platform will include games from the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, WNBA, NASCAR and college sports, including the men's and women's NCAA Tournament, as well as golf, tennis and the FIFA World Cup.
TVN’S MEDIA JOBS
New Jobs Posted To TVNewsCheck
New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include openings for Sinclair’s corporate engineering team; Hearst’s national consumer unit; Lockwood’s station in Augusta, Ga.; Nexstar’s Houston CW and Hearst’s CBS affil in Louisville.
Leading executives from NBCUniversal Local, E.W. Scripps, Sage Media and WideOrbit will discuss how station groups are creating opportunities across all media for political advertising in 2024 and how agencies are planning their buys in a TVNewsCheck Working Lunch Webinar on March 5 at 1 p.m. ET. Register here.
Programming Everywhere, TVNewsCheck’s conference gathering content executives and creators across platforms to provoke innovative thinking, will return to the NAB Show for its second year under the theme Ideas Beyond Boundaries on April 14. Register here.
