On this week’s episode of Variety‘s “Strictly Business” podcast, media industry veteran Jon Miller, CEO of Integrated Media, offers his perspective on what it’s like to be part of a megabucks merger that represents an enormous bet on the future. He examines the deals and the varied motives of the biggest players in media.
Miller, whose résumé includes stints in senior business roles at News Corp, Viacom and Time Warner, breaks down the strategic rationale that drives most acquisitions for media which is deep into consolidation mode in the U.S. He sees the current wave of deals as having started in 2022 when AT&T spun off WarnerMedia barely four years after the telco acquired Time Warner.
“That was the starting bell of ‘Everyone’s open for business’ kind of thing,” Miller observers. “Now Comcast and what it’s done with both recent and spinning out NBCUniversal, we’re looking at all the companies stepping back saying, ‘Do I have the right assets to compete going forward? And if not, what should I do?'”
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From Miller’s point of view, you’re seeing a couple of different answers. “One is, I kind of want to go like-for-like, and I would put [Paramount Skydance] and Warner Bros. Discovery as like-for-like. They’re essentially in the same business. You can argue some of the differences, but they’re essentially the same content-distribution type businesses,” he says. “So you’re saying, ‘I’m going to go more differently and try to either vertically integrate or go for different capabilities.’ And that’s Fox-Roku, right? That’s not like-for-like, that is looking at two different sectors of, of the landscape and combining them. And that’s a different answer. And I think those are the two fundamental vectors.”
