Next week, the nation’s largest TV networks and streamers will treat their advertising partners to a showcase of their forthcoming content slates: new shows, returning shows, sporting events, etcetera. The upfronts—a once-opulent, multiday wine-and-dine affair across greater Midtown, from Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden to the Beacon Theater and Hammerstein Ballroom—has become a bit more subdued in the post-Covid late-stage linear era. But it remains a cornerstone of the business: a tussle for advertising commitments fought with sizzle reels and diminishing expense accounts. Without being too hyperbolic, this year’s event comes at a rather obvious inflection point for the industry. Yes, the TV business has been contracting for decades now—indeed, Jimmy Kimmel has been doing some version of his ratings-go-down, prices-go-up joke at the Disney upfront since 2010—but 2025 is indisputably the year when the gradual decline truly gave way to free fall. Brian Roberts is spinning off the NBCUniversal cable assets, ex-Bravo; David Zaslav has given Warner Bros. Discovery optionality to do the same; Shari is trying to sell Paramount (if she can assuage Trump and Carr); Iger is moving ESPN’s focus to streaming. So on, so forth. In that regard, there have been a few notable developments in the run-up to the forthcoming showcases. This week, NBCU’s Mark Lazarus unveiled the official name for SpinCo—Versant—while hinting at an M&A strategy that, contrary to expectations, will not focus on adding more cable networks to the portfolio. Laz, the soon-to-be Versant C.E.O., instead cited Golf Channel’s acquisition of tee-time reservation app GolfNow as a model for future acquisitions. In an interview with CNBC, he suggested that the financial news network might acquire personal finance or fintech platforms to boost its digital offering. For MSNBC, he suggested acquiring podcasts and creating a podcast network as a separate business unit from the linear network. Meanwhile, each brand will be responsible for its own streaming strategy. Some Versant brands are better positioned for digital growth than others, as I noted last month. CNBC is far from realizing the full potential of its digital business, whereas MSNBC has a much less obvious path to post-linear relevance (respectfully, a liberal podcast network won’t get them there). Either way, it’s impossible to look at Versant’s smattering of stand-alone brands, all struggling to determine their own piecemeal digital diversification strategies, and not feel an even stronger conviction that these assets will eventually be sold off one by one, or handed over to a private equity firm like Apollo for expedited value extraction. Obviously, Laz will spin a very different narrative onstage at Radio City next week, but there’s really only so much lipstick you can put on the pig. For what it’s worth, the Versant neologism, like Quibi and Tronc before it, has inspired a lot of unforgiving humor highlighting its resemblance to pharma-babble. The word actually refers to “a slope,” which inadvertently connotes decline. In the meantime, NBCUniversal has afforded its redheaded stepchild a relatively soft landing: On Wednesday, it announced a deal to sell advertising inventory for Versant for two years—the same duration of time Brian must wait in order to sell the company without taking a tax hit.