Transcript
A (0:01)
Hey, man, how are you?
B (0:02)
Good. How are you? Good to see you.
A (0:05)
It's good to see you too.
B (0:08)
Right, here we are live. Yeah.
A (0:11)
And enough with America. We're going to talk about Europe, right?
B (0:16)
Well, now we're going to start in America and then we're going to move to Europe.
A (0:20)
Yeah, but quick stop. There's like one American company, three European companies, so I'm happy. But yeah, I get happy for little things about Europe. So.
B (0:29)
So cool. Without further ado, let's welcome to the Media Odyssey podcast live.
A (0:34)
That is Marian Rete and that is Ivan Chaparro.
B (0:38)
We are going to jump into earnings on four different companies, all of whom are going through some sort of change at the current moment through mergers and acquisitions or spin outs or any number of different things. So let's jump right in it. Without further ado, I will share my screen to bring on my former alma mater, Versant, which used to be part of NBCUniversal Comcast Cabletown, which got spun out on the first of this year as its own standalone company with the cable holdings and a bunch of other weird little things that they've bought over the years. So this is the first earnings report from Versant as a standalone company. But what's important to understand is that These figures for 2025 are being compared to the full year of this, this bunch of holdings inside Comcast from the previous year. So this is year on year comparison of the same set of enterprises what used to be parked inside of Comcast and now are standing out on their own. And what you can see here is the only growth in this entire company came from this weird collection of platforms. So there's some streaming stuff. There's. But it's mostly stuff like Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes and Golf now and some other new streaming stuff associated with cnbc. But where you can see everything else is really just in bad shape here. And this is probably the argument for Comcast spinning this out is distribution is down, advertising is down, their licensing business is down, total revenue is down 5%. But even worse for them, net income down 32% year on year. This is not a futures based business.
A (2:25)
When you look at it so quick, one for you, when you say this is the reason why they're spinning this out, when I see this, I'm like, why take this out and make it so obvious that it's doing bad, right? Is it a way of protecting the rest of the group? Because clearly this thing, no one will want to buy it. I don't know if they're planning on doing that in, you know, any shape or form, but it. That doesn't look good.
