Can NBCUniversal Survive Without Comcast?

**Dylan Byers** (0:02)
Something like NBCUniversal could provide entry into that space for a Netflix, Amazon, Apple at a considerably lower price. And, and particularly thinking about Netflix, there is also that theme parks business you mentioned, which if you are thinking about getting into that business as Netflix, that's really attractive because almost overnight, you acquire basically your own version of Disneyland.

**Peter Hamby** (0:28)
Welcome to The Powers That Be Daily, Pucks podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley and Hollywood and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby.
It's Tuesday, June 30th. Today, I'm joined by Dylan Byers to break down yesterday's massive media news. Comcast, after 15 years of being in the content business, is spinning off NBCUniversal and its many assets, including NBC News, the streaming service Peacock, Theme Parks, the British broadcaster Sky, and much more. There's a lot here to unpack, including questions of who might buy what next, and Dylan has an early read on the market. We'll discuss all that and much more on today's episode, The Powers That Be.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:23)
You know, we talk a lot about finding a job, but what about building a career? Walmart is actually making that happen for their associates by investing over a billion dollars in training and education. And the proof is in the numbers. Last year, more than 100,000 associates earned promotions. Add in great benefits like 401k matching and paid parental leave, and it's clear. Walmart isn't just a place to work, it's a place to grow.
Go see for yourself at walmart.com/grow at Walmart.

**Peter Hamby** (1:55)
Happy Tuesday, everybody, and welcome to The Powers That Be. I'm joined today by my colleague Dylan Byers with some analysis on the massive media news this week. Comcast is spinning off NBCUniversal and a bunch of assets included in that. This ends a 15-year corporate marriage. Jack Donaghy no longer has a job with Cable Town or 30 Rock.
Dylan, you're going to give our listeners many more details, but let me just set the table here and read the assets that are being spun off from Comcast. The Universal Pictures, Film Studio, NBC and Telemundo, NBC News of course, the streaming service Peacock, the cable channel Bravo, I know people still love their Bravo, lucrative theme parks division, and Sky, the British broadcaster. Did I get everything there?

**Dylan Byers** (2:44)
Yeah, that's the bulk of it, Peter. But look, your point is right.
As long as I've been covering media, which is 15 years, the Comcast has owned NBC and that reflected a thesis, which was that you should have the pipes and you should have the programming. And that thesis worked for quite a while until it didn't. And if you look right now at what the market is rewarding, as the landscape is changing, and as these companies feel the need to sort of scale up, the market is rewarding pure plays. And so the thesis now that Brian Roberts has is that if you take Comcast on its own and that connectivity business on its own, you open up all sorts of opportunities to potentially partner with someone like Charter and scale up as you're competing with wireless companies, satellite providers, other things like that.
The calculus for NBC is a little bit different, right? Obviously, there's a lot of interest in the market for content companies, for IP, for companies that have sports rights. You look at the fact that it wasn't just David Ellison who went after Paramount, it was also Ted Cerenos at Netflix. And you think, okay, maybe we can position this media company over here and potentially find some dance partners as well. I think this is a seismic moment in the long and protracted dismantling of the media industry that existed when I started covering it 15 years ago. But what the ramifications really are for each specific company is hard to tell until we actually know who they might do deals with, right? They say that this is not about M&A, like Brian Roberts went out on Monday morning and said this is absolutely not a precursor to M&A. But I think if you talk to almost any analyst in the industry, they would tell you that to a certain point the rationale for something like this are those future deals. And we just have to wait and see who those deals are with before we really know what this is going to look like for all of those assets that you just mentioned.

**Peter Hamby** (4:53)
When this push alert came through yesterday, there might have been an instinct, maybe just on my part, to think of another TV spin-off, which is Versant, I still don't know how to say it. But the group that was spun off of NBCUniversal, the group of cable channels that includes MSNOW and some others, the reason for that was those are, in Dylan Byers' verbiage, declining linear assets.