Business

The FCC under Democratic control has decided to tighten its TV station ownership rules. Under the rules, the FCC will make it harder for one station to affiliate with more than one Big Four broadcast network. Stations say that the FCC’s approach is unjustified given the intense competitive pressure they face for advertising revenue. The FCC decision, released Tuesday afternoon, was a substantial victory for the cable TV industry, which has tied current station ownership rules to a rise in signal blackouts and higher retransmission consent fees.

Wall Street ended higher Tuesday at the start of a holiday-shortened week. Trading was relatively light as U.S. markets reopened following the Christmas Day holiday. Still, the latest gains were widespread, with advancers outnumbering decliners by nearly 3 to 1 on the New York Stock Exchange.

The tentative agreement would end 18 months of negotiations that included a one-day work stoppage.

Automakers spent an estimated $274.3 million on national TV spending in November, down 8.9% compared to a year ago. Year-to-date through Dec. 14, spending is down 15.8%, according to iSpot. tv. TV ad impressions were down 18.5% in November to 25.2 billion. But year-to-date impressions were up 4% to 306.6 billion.

The parade of CEO pay disclosures in regulatory filings in 2023 will be remembered for bad timing, ugly optics and symbolic shareholder votes.

The mega-merger will enable Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries to create the country’s largest media and entertainment business.

The company has discussed multiyear deals worth at least $50 million to train its generative AI systems on publishers’ news articles.

A federal judge on Friday gave the go-ahead to a lawsuit against the social media company X, formerly known as Twitter, in which workers claim that the company promised but never paid millions of dollars in bonuses. (Noah Berger/AP)

The billionaire Koch family and its network of like-minded donors are tiptoeing back into presidential politics, putting money behind their opposition to former President Donald Trump and backing an alternative candidate in the 2024 Republican primary, Nikki Haley.

Jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include openings for investigative reporter, integrated digital specialist, local sales manager. key accounts manager, director of sales, creative services director, a news anchor/reporter, nightside news reporter and video technical support coordinator.

The cable network and broadcaster held merger talks 20 years ago. A possible mega-deal between Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount could bring those ideas to the forefront again.

Lionsgate announced that its television and motion picture studios will become a publicly traded company in a $4.6 billion deal. The transaction, separating the studios from Lionsgate’s Starz unit, includes merging the studios with a special purpose acquisition company, Screaming Eagle Acquisition Corp., and is expected to raise $350 million for Lionsgate. The proceeds will strengthen Lionsgate’s balance sheet and help it pay for the acquisition of eOne from Hasbro.

It’s the latest change for the organization, which now says it is “laser focused” on its ground game in early states.

Wall Street ticked closer to record highs on Friday to cap its eighth straight winning week.

She fought to keep control of her family’s media empire. Now she’s considering an exit as financial pressures mount.

Analysts and industry sources have already raised a number of questions about what a WBD-Paramount combo would look like and the effect it could have on the larger TV and film landscape. The first piece of the puzzle in any serious integration plans would be sorting out what’s to be done with WBD and Paramount’s U.S. cable networks, MoffettNathanson’s team of media analysts wrote in a research note Thursday, after news of the merger talks broke Wednesday afternoon.

Bite-size clips, granular targeting and simple buying afford advantages to the Alphabet-owned platform.

In this repeat of the Talking TV episode from March 17, John Hane, president and CEO of BitPath, shares an update on how far along the ATSC 3.0 consortium is toward building a national network that will support leasing data services and get cash registers finally ringing for broadcasters. A full transcript of the conversation is included.

Wall Street bounced back Thursday after a big loss, and the S&P 500 again neared a record.

Ahead of next Wednesday’s fast-approaching deadline, broadcasting and pay TV industry representatives are using the limited time left to pitch the FCC on their preferred substance of potentially new media ownership rules. Broadcasters are urging the FCC to loosen some current rules and allow for more TV station ownership consolidation at the local level. Meanwhile, cable and satellite TV companies think current rules have loopholes that need to be closed to reduce the number of signal blackouts and moderate their payments to stations for carriage.

PlayStation will no longer be removing over 1,300 Discovery TV shows from its platform next month. Sony had previously announced that users would not be able to watch Discovery content on PlayStation after Dec. 31, even if they had already purchased it. However, the firm now says that due to an “updated licensing agreement” with Warner Bros. — which owns the Discovery brand — consumers will now be able to access their previously purchased shows “for at least the next 30 months.”

CBS parent Paramount Global is reportedly in merger talks with Warner Bros. Discovery – in yet another sign that legacy media institutions continue their search for sufficient scale to compete with Netflix, Apple, and Amazon in the streaming video space. If CBS is in play, that could draw others into a bidding contest, including Comcast, according to a CNBC report. If Comcast came away the winner, the Philadelphia-based media conglomerate would own the NBC and CBS networks. However, FCC rules do not permit the common ownership of two Big Four broadcast networks without a wavier — a restriction that dates to 1946.

James Gorman, who will step aside as CEO of Morgan Stanley at the end of this year after overseeing what is widely regarded as a carefully-planned succession process at the investment bank, will officially join Disney’s board in February. And he says he intends to be involved in Disney’s succession planning, finding a suitable person to follow Bob Iger. In an exit interview with CNBC Thursday, Gorman said that he will be joining Disney’s special succession committee when he officially joins the board next year.

Old habits die hard. So Warner Bros. Discovery’s CEO David Zaslav just sat down with Paramount Global chief executive Bob Bakish to talk about merging, and the media business yet again confronted the possibility of a spasm of mega-deals reshaping the landscape.

When the opening bell rang on Wall Street Thursday, however, investors didn’t exactly give the idea of “Warnamount” a ringing endorsement. Shares of Paramount slipped 1% and WBD slid 4% in early trading. Paramount is 40% below its 52-week high, and WBD has lost more than half its value since the April 2022 close of the WarnerMedia-Discovery merger.