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    How ViacomCBS's Content Deals Cost U.S. Taxpayers $4 Billion

    A new report details ViacomCBS’s use of a labyrinthine tax shelter to sell rights to its shows and films overseas.Dismissed by critics and devoured by fans, “Transformers: Age of Extinction” was the top box office film in 2014, bringing in $1.1 billion, with more than three-quarters of those dollars coming from overseas. More

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    Discovery and AT&T: How a Huge Media Deal Was Done

    An early-morning meeting at a Greenwich Village townhouse, under the watchful eye of Steve McQueen, was part of a monthslong campaign.In the predawn hours of April 1, David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery, arrived at a rented townhouse in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village — decorated with photos of rock stars and one of the actor Steve McQueen in sunglasses holding a gun — to prepare for a meeting that would soon reverberate across the American media industry. More

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    AT&T's WarnerMedia Group to Merge With Discovery

    AT&T’s WarnerMedia group is merging with the reality programmer Discovery. What does that mean for your favorite shows?It’s as if Logan Roy, the fictional patriarch of the Waystar Royco media empire on HBO’s popular series “Succession,” masterminded the deal himself: AT&T has thrown in the towel on its media business and decided to spin it off into a new company that will merge with Discovery Inc. More

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    AT&T-Discovery Deal Would Create a Media Juggernaut

    A merger could be announced as soon as Monday, in a deal that would offload the media business that AT&T fought to buy.Less than three years after AT&T spent over $85 billion and millions more fending off a government challenge to buy Time Warner, one of the biggest prizes in media, the phone company has decided on a completely different strategy. More

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    ViacomCBS stock tanks, losing more than half its value in less than a week.

    Shares of ViacomCBS, the media goliath led by Shari Redstone, took a nosedive this week, with the company losing more than half of its market value in just four days.The stock was as high as $100 on Monday. By the close of trading on Friday it had fallen to just over $48, a drop of more than 51 percent in less than a week.There’s no better way to say it: The company’s stock tanked.What happened? Several things all at once. First, it is worth noting that ViacomCBS had actually been on a bit of a tear up until this week’s meltdown, rising nearly tenfold in the past 12 months. About a year ago, it was trading at around $12 per share.That rally came as the company, like the rest of the media industry, had made a move toward streaming. It recently launched Paramount+ to compete against the likes of Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max and others. The service tapped ViacomCBS’s vast archive of content from the CBS broadcast network, Paramount Film Studios and several cable channels, including Nickelodeon and MTV.That shift matters because ViacomCBS has been hit hard by an overall decline in cable viewership. The company’s pretax profits have fallen nearly 17 percent from two years ago, and its debt has topped more than $21 billion.But the stock rose so much that Robert M. Bakish, ViacomCBS’s chief executive, decided to take advantage of the boon by offering new shares to raise as much as $3 billion. The underwriters who managed the sale priced the offering at around $85 per share earlier this week, a discount to where it had been trading on Monday.You could say it backfired. When a company issues new stock, it normally dilutes the value of current shareholders, so some drop in price is expected. But a few days after the offering, one of Wall Street’s most influential research firms, MoffettNathanson, published a report that questioned the company’s value and downgraded the stock to a “sell.” The stock should really only be worth $55, MoffettNathanson said. That started the nosedive.“We never, ever thought we would see Viacom trading close to $100 per share,” read the report, which was written by Michael Nathanson, a co-founder of the firm. “Obviously, neither did ViacomCBS’s management,” it continued, citing the new stock offering.Streaming is still a money-losing enterprise, and that means the old line media companies must still endure more losses over more years before they can return to profitability.In the case of ViacomCBS, it seemed to hasten the cord-cutting when it signed a new licensing agreement with the NFL that will cost the company more than $2 billion a year through 2033. As part of the agreement, ViacomCBS also plans to stream the games on Paramount+, which is much cheaper than a cable bundle.As the games, considered premium programming, shift to streaming, “the industry runs the risk of both higher cord-cutting and greater viewer erosion,” Mr. Nathanson wrote.On Friday, an analyst with Wells Fargo also downgraded the stock, slashing the bank’s price target to $59.But the market decided it wasn’t even worth that much. It closed on Friday barely a quarter above 48 bucks. More

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    Why Oprah’s Meghan and Harry Special Won’t Have a Streaming Home

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The British Royal FamilyInterview and FalloutWhat Meghan and Harry DisclosedWhat We LearnedMemories of DianaAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhy Oprah’s Meghan and Harry Special Won’t Have a Streaming HomeThe three participants’ ties to Netflix and Apple, along with Ms. Winfrey’s desire to reach a big live-viewing audience, paved the way to an old-school deal with CBS.Oprah Winfrey’s interview of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry was a rarity in the age of streaming: a cultural event powered by network TV.Credit…Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesEdmund Lee and March 9, 2021, 6:28 p.m. ETOprah Winfrey pulled off what has become a rare television event: the tell-all interview that turns into a cultural moment. On Sunday, an audience of more than 17 million watched bombshell revelations tumble out of the mouths of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry as they described their lives under the palace gaze in a two-hour CBS special that rivaled any of the royal dramas on the Netflix series “The Crown.”Social-media discussion of the show has continued since the credits rolled, leaving many people who missed it wondering where they could stream it. For the next 30 days, the special will be available on CBS.com and the CBS app. But after that, it will not have a home on any streaming platform.That’s because, from the start of negotiations, Ms. Winfrey’s company, Harpo Productions, the owner of the program, envisioned the special as something suited to a big broadcast network, three people with knowledge of the deal said. Harpo did not even attempt to sell the streaming rights to Netflix or Paramount+, the streaming platform owned by CBS’s parent company, ViacomCBS, the people said.Harpo’s old-school strategy of avoiding subscription-video-on-demand services came about partly because of the complications presented by Ms. Winfrey’s deal to make programs for Apple’s streaming platform, AppleTV+, the people said. Ms. Winfrey’s AppleTV+ deal includes an interview series, “The Oprah Conversation,” which has featured Barack Obama, Dolly Parton and Mariah Carey. Another wrinkle was the roughly $100 million production deal that Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and Prince Harry struck last year with Netflix, the people said.Ms. Winfrey’s company also did not approach cable networks when seeking the right venue for the special, the people said. Hoping for the greatest possible reach, she sought a deal with one of the major broadcast networks, which do not require a subscription and consistently draw the largest audiences for live viewing. Harpo also liked the idea of appearing in the Sunday night slot after “60 Minutes,” the highly rated CBS News show where Ms. Winfrey was a special correspondent in 2017 and 2018, the people said.As part of the $7 million deal, ViacomCBS won something valuable: the rights to broker international distribution on behalf of Harpo. The program aired Monday on ITV in Britain and will be available in more than 80 countries.Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, cut a deal with Ms. Winfrey in 2019 to produce a series on mental health. Credit…Joe Pugliese/Harpo ProductionsMs. Winfrey revealed during the interview that she had spent about three years trying to land the exclusive. Along the way, she went into business with Meghan and her husband. Adding to the jumble of media alliances, the couple in 2019 cut a deal with Ms. Winfrey to produce a documentary series about mental health that is scheduled to stream on AppleTV+.Some industry observers were surprised by the CBS deal because of another corporate entanglement: Ms. Winfrey’s long relationship with Discovery Communications, the cable giant that invested in her cable network, OWN, over a decade ago. David Zaslav, Discovery’s intensely competitive chief executive, decided to continue the investment even after OWN experienced growing pains early on. The company now controls the network, which has become a ratings success. Discovery also recently launched its own streamer, Discovery+, where Ms. Winfrey hosts an interview series, “Super Soul.” (The company bought advertising time on the CBS special and provided a commercial featuring Ms. Winfrey.)It turns out that digital television, originally meant as a convenient alternative to clunky cable, can be just as knotty and cumbrous as the business it’s trying to replace.The morning after her interview with the Sussexes, Ms. Winfrey appeared on “CBS This Morning,” a program anchored by her close friend, Gayle King, where she presented extra material that didn’t make the special. CBS announced on Tuesday that it will show the special again Friday night at 8.John Koblin More