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Levi Ramsey's avatar

Turner doubling NBC's bid for the NHL is I think the key thing in this. The linear bundle is more sports (and news: broadly, "proportion of time 7-14 days from now where a linear channel can't tell you what frame they'll be showing") reliant than ever: If 30-40% of the linear bundle subscriber base in 2010 was mainly there for sports/news, it's almost certainly a majority now (possibly as high as low 60s) and that share will only grow.

So it's only a matter of time before someone (DirecTPG maybe?) decides that their only way forward is to super-serve sports/news (and maybe things like concerts? Could some combination with SiriusXM and/or LiveNation be in play?). $30-plus/month for linear ESPN as long as MNF/CFP/SEC/ACC/NBA playoffs are at least $10/event PPV (or just straight not available) on ESPN+, smaller payouts for the other sports/news packages. Content packages that don't have needle-moving live events either take zero carriage fee and hope to make it back on advertising or agree to a wholesaling arrangement for their streaming or go premium linear at the streaming price point (e.g. AMC+ through DirecTV).

So if Discovery (and, by extension, Malone) see this coming down the pike, then getting sports rights to keep the Discovery linear bundle going (a marketing channel for Discovery+ which itself generates revenue, after all), on top of getting buzzworthy shows for OTT streaming is the name of the game. They may well have told T that they were only interested if Turner added marquee sports rights beyond NBA/March Madness/MLB, because T had been de-emphasizing sports since the Warner acquisition (I suspect DirecTPG will go hard at renewing Sunday Ticket, despite T making it abundantly clear that they weren't interested) and then comes out of nowhere with the NHL (the only thing close to a marquee rights available).

On SiriusXM/LiveNation, Viacom making a play to merge with both might not be insane. Return MTV to music (in this case concerts)... meanwhile broadcasting events to the more premium National Amusements theater footprint could be useful for the Redstones.

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