Today, as a Thanksgiving digestif, I went back and forth with William D. Cohan, the author and former M&A banker, whose own biweekly email, Dry Powder, is a part of Puck. We’ve done this a couple times: Bill brings Wall Street insight to our chat about the media’s subscriber obsession, Netflix vs. Tesla, Apollo’s entertainment goals, and, of course, this season of Succession.
Matt Belloni: Earnings season for Big Media just ended, and the takeaway is that streaming services are slowing. At least for Disney and ViacomCBS, that has translated into drops in share price. The market largely values subscription creation, presumably on the theory that only three or four global services will survive this arms race. Meanwhile, Netflix, the leader in the category, is now more valuable than Disney, even though its subs are slowing, too. I’ll again ask the age-old question: Is Netflix overvalued?
