The death of the mainstream media, at least the TV part of it, is much closer than you think.
Comcast, which desperately wanted to be in the cable news (so desperately it gave Al Sharpton a job) just as desperately doesn’t want to be in the cable business so it ‘spun off’ or dumped its cable business into a company called Versant.
That includes MSNBC or as it’s now called MS Now. Here’s how the shares did on the first day of trading.
Versant Media Group Inc., the parent of CNBC, USA and other cable-TV networks, fell as much as 15% in its first official day of trading after being spun off from Comcast Corp. The shares, trading at $40.78 mid-morning in New York, give the company a stock market value of $5.94 billion based on 144.2 million shares outstanding. Comcast distributed the shares, which trade under the symbol VSNT on the Nasdaq exchange, to its investors on Jan. 2.
I’m not a stock market expert, but that seems bad.
If Netflix succeeds in cannibalizing WB to launch its all-trans Superhero shows, Discovery’s cable networks into another company with a stupid placeholder name. That package will include CNN. And I think the odds are good that it’ll crash and burn too.
Are there going to be separate buyers for CNN or MS NOW? Probably not the latter and I wouldn’t bet too hard on the former.
And then how long until Comcast gets tired of NBC? And until Paramount gets tired of CBS? The ‘insiders’ attacking Bari Weiss will preside over a charnel house if they win. And even Disney at some point will tire of subsidizing ABC.
Then the TV mainstream media will be history. Likely in less than a decade.
