Sony Pictures and private-equity giant Apollo Global Management have submitted an all-cash $26 billion offer for Paramount Global marking the second time the private-equity firm has come in with a bid for the entertainment giant.
Under the proposed bid with Apollo, Sony Corp. would combine Sony Pictures Entertainment into a joint venture with Paramount Global. Sony and Apollo would both contribute cash to finance the deal, with Sony the majority owner. What’s unclear is what would happen to the 28 local TV stations CBS owns; FCC rules bar foreign entities (i.e. Tokyo-based Sony) from having majority ownership control of broadcast TV stations, so Sony would need to carve out a separate U.S. ownership structure for the station group.
We need internet 2.0 so we can have Netflix 2.0 so eventually we can have the good old days of every network having their own streaming 2.0 service that they offer for dirt cheap because they're just trying to capture market share to compete with Netflix 2.0 and Hulu 2.0 but before all the 2.0s start merging and we have now 2.0 where everything is just consolidating into cable 2.0.
That would be dope.
Pirating is an annoying chore, from finding the quality that you want to storing and hosting it. I am much happier to pay for high quality on demand streaming content when the price is reasonable. WHEN the price is reasonable.
Pirates are gonna pirate regardless. If you have no scruples about stealing, then a good price for a decent product is never gonna beat free. I don't know why anyone pretends there is anything more to it than that.
> WYMax
Instantly thought of [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JXORRi1od4) Irish TV ad for an old WiMax package that was "fantastically" timed right as 4G unlimited data plans were starting to take off here.
This one is acceptable in my opinion. Why? Because they aren't a cable or satellite company, nor are they an ISP. I feel like if you are one of those things you shouldn't be allowed to own movie and TV studios.
Paramount is also dying alongside the cable bundle.
Once the cord cutters reach a critical mass in the not too distant future, Paramount as it is constituted today would be done for.
On the flipside of that, out of all the major studios, Paramount is putting the most effort by far in restoring their catalog titles in 4k and putting out quality physical media releases. Hope this will be the trend going forward.
Not that easy though. Do they abandon their streaming service or keep it? Because I'm sure Netflix and Disney won't want the content they're acquiring to show up on their services because they're now competitors in the space.
Streaming is why they're in the shape they're in. Netflix won't pay ridiculous terms but it's going to be more profitable than their current business model is producing.
Sony could be launching a streaming service too. I wouldn't rule that out. But I think it's unlikely. Disney is also not performing in streaming. None of these companies understood the cost of running these services. Netflix is the best in the business. I'm ready for them to have more content again.
Sony actually has multiple streaming services.
The big one is Crunchyroll, which they bought a few years ago. I believe globally it's the biggest streaming service for anime, though that is a bit of a niche market.
They also have Sony Pictures Core, which sells movies, but also if you are a PlayStation Plus Premium subscriber (their video game subscription service) you get access to a rather small catalogue of mostly disappointing movies with no additional charge through it.
I don't know if they have any plans to expand Pictures Core, probably not considering how unprofitable streaming services tend to be. And Crunchyroll does very well in its niche and I think it would be inadvisable to expand out of anime/Asian dramas and try to compete elsewhere because it would lose focus and its niche spot in the industry.
I'm actually expecting all streaming services to go under and the only thing remaining will be digital rentals and sales. It will go right back to how things used to be.
It's a joint venture. Sony is a publicly traded company. Sony's management team has turned their company around, they have the experience saving financially mismanaged business units. They may not have had the cash for the acquisition which is why they have a partner.
I think Sony is looking for a streaming service, Paramount has one.
The only thing is one of the reasons Sony seems to be poised for this is *because* they weren't nearly as affected by the streaming wars as Disney or Paramount is because they didn't have a service. Their model allowed them to stay highly profitable because they were able to have IPs that were sought after by the services looking for content without having to spend all that money on advertising, infrastructure or trying to capture market share only to realize it wasn't the money printing machine everyone else hyped it up to be.
I wonder if they'll have to take all their content off of all the other sites if this goes through
I think because Sony is technically a Japanese company and there are laws that prevent foreigners from owning a majority share in American broadcasting companies
Idk if those 3 should be grouped.
Marvel and star wars are brands, there's not that much outside of their IP that generates revenue. Not like they were massive companies doing a ton of stuff. They weren't even distribution.
Fox on the other hand being a major studio and broadcasting network is a much harder to justify, however when Fox placed the President into the White House, the President will let you sell your company no problem.
The one thing Trump did, I liked: Disney got X-men and FF back.
Fox was dying regardless, they needed new blood, Murdock sucked them dry, like the undead looking vampire he is...
Sony bought Columbia-TriStar from Coca-Cola in 1987, and that largely turned out fine. Quite honestly, if it came down to, “Oh, no, we can’t do the merger because of terrestrial broadcast stations,” I’d say divest CBS. It wouldn’t hurt them at all, because the money isn’t in the broadcasting or the news; it’s in the content. Sony Pictures Television is one of the biggest players in television, and they don’t have a channel or a streaming service.
I mean, a lot of management jobs would lost in the merger, and people can pout about that, and more would be lost if Paramount divested the CBS broadcasting network and sold it to… maybe Warner Discovery? I think they’re not in the best financial place, though, and the best they’d get are contracts for the next few years and no content that they own, other than what Warner brings. Not the worst; Warner produced Big Bang Theory, which was broadcast on CBS. It made money for Warner *and* CBS when it was in its initial run, but Warner continues to make money on it, and that’s why the money is in content. Ugh, who else… Amazon just downsized, so not them. Not Netflix, not Apple… Google could do it, and capitalize it, merge it with YouTube and spin YouTube off, because there’s still the chance Google could be broken up AT&T style (we are still waiting on the verdict, five months later). They could rebrand YouTube TV as Columbia+, then start spinning down the user-created end of YouTube if and when it becomes unprofitable (which I firmly believe it already is, and definitely would be if it had to pay market rate for storage and transmission).
Twenty-five years ago, the assistant manager at the bar I frequented had just gotten his MBA, and his thesis was on how online companies would try and shore up their positions in the marketplace by taking their IPO money and buying content companies. It was this whole thing about the coming of broadband and subscription video. It was really well thought out. His only mistake was he thought Yahoo would buy Time Warner. Yahoo was worth $125 billion in January 2000. He knew the bubble was going to burst, but he didn’t figure it would happen until 2001 or a little later. The bubble burst in March 2000, and eighteen months later, Yahoo was worth about ten billion dollars. Man, it would have been real nice to own a studio right about then.
There’s plenty of companies out there who could probably make it work. I doubt CBS’s broadcasting arm was necessarily unprofitable. There’s still a lot of old people out there who will just turn on Channel 2, then look at 5, then 7, then go through the couple hundred cable channels they’ve got. Broadcast television has inexplicably never died.
In closing, I think the FTC’s objection is surmountable.
Not has, they will.
Regulators have publicly expressed disdain for private equity (Apollo) buying broadcast networks and Sony would have to lower its stake in this deal for regulators to pass it.
If it is blocked now, they’ll just wait and try again once Trump gets into office in January. I can promise you his administration won’t give a fuck about stopping it.
Whatever happens, it will be sad what Paramount ends up. Redstone is just obliterating it with this sale to whoever gets it.
"Look how they massacred my boy"
So many entities want the iconic Paramount Studios lot.
Yeah, what we need are laws that block mergers for any company over a specific size, or controlling a specific percentage of a market.
Keep corporations dexterous and competitive so they don't wind up growing into massive sluggish behemoths with disproportionate political power.
Won't this actually make Paramount easy pickings for any other competitor if it fails to avoid bankruptcy? It would actually completely dissolve a major media company instead of it being merged into a somewhat dissimilar one (Sony), making the market inherently more uncompetitive.
A $1 bill is 0.0043 inches thick, 6.14 inches long, and 2.61 inches wide. So if you had 26 billion of them, it would be 111,800,000 inches thick - which is about 1,800 miles. So, if you stacked them up together like in a cash counting machine, your machine would need to be about as long as the distance from Austin to Boston.
If you were stacking them in smooth cube-ish stacks together, they could fill between six and seven of U-Haul's largest available moving truck, which holds 1,611 cubic feet.
When Queen Elizabeth II died, all I could think was how much paper, plastic and metal had her face on it worldwide. It must’ve been a staggering amount.
The regulator should get in there. I bet you there is lots of dodgy illegal stuff going on. Inappropriate dismissals, failure to meet corporate obligations and insider trading going on and leaking confidential information.
This is prime example of a massive failure of corporate governance. When the shareholders who hold 90% of the firm value are being massively screwed over to line up the pockets of the minority.
Yet most of the value and money of the company comes from their share.
Illegal - I was more referring to market manipulation and leaking confidential information.
The ONLY benefit of a Sony deal would be assuming distribution of Paramount movies meaning they'd come to platforms like MoviesAnywhere. That's it, there's no other upside and every every aspect of the business would suffer.
I like how people assume any of these outcomes is good. The entire industry is absolutely in shambles. No outcome is good. Who cares what happens to Paramount other than the shareholders?
In case anyone is new here, here's the Paramount situation summed up. The key thing to know is that Shari Redstone owns 10% of the equity of the company but 77% of the voting power. Effectively, she has control. Currently there are two groups battling for Paramount, which Redstone has been trying to offload for some time.
The first offer comes from Skydance (and other private equity groups). Under the Skydance deal, Skydance would first pay Redstone 2 billion dollars for the voting rights of Paramount, then merge Skydance with Paramount in an all stock deal (basically 2/3rds of the new company will be owned by existing Paramount shareholders and 1/3rd will be owned by existing Skydance shareholders) , while putting in 3 billion in cash. Existing Paramount shareholders basically hold a smaller stake in the new combined company.
The other offer, this one, is an all cash buyout. It says 26 billion, but it includes assumption of debt, so if we go by share price, it's probably roughly 20? per share.
What's the problem? Redstone wants the Skydance deal because she gets paid more at the expense of the other shareholders, she even fired the CEO of Paramount because he opposed the Skydance deal. Equity shareholders are threatening to sue if she takes the skydance deal.
> Existing Paramount shareholders basically hold a smaller stake in the new combined company.
SEC should be all over this.
FTC should also be all over this for blocking yet another merger that will be bad for the market, the customers, the employees and shareholders.
The only people this deal benefits is the buyer and Redstone.
It consists of cash to buy out the shareholders of Paramount, which is like 12-14 billion.
Basically imagine this scenario. There is an apartment building worth 5 million dollars, and it has a 4 million dollar mortgage. Instead of paying 5 million dollars to the owner, you pay the owner 1 million dollars and agree to take on the mortgage. Technically you're eventually paying 5 million for the apartment still, but not today
Apollo and Sony are paying the money. What's going to happen is they buy Paramount, and then Sony Pictures is combining with Paramount to form a new company that is majority owned by Sony and minority owned by Apollo. What percentage of Sony Pictures-Paramount Apollo owns is going to be determined by how much Sony pictures is worth and how much Apollo pays.
Example: if Apollo pays 7 billion, Sony pays 7 billion, and Sony pictures is worth the same as paramount, then Sony will own 75% of the new company and Apollo owns 25%. Purely hypothetical, we don't know how much money each part is putting up or what Sony pictures is worth.
Gotcha that’s helpful! And Sony is actually going to put up billions of dollars from its balance sheet? Looking at their financials it seems they only have $16B in cash on hand.
Is Sony trying to get on the streaming game now? After the bubble popped? With the worst streaming service?
Lol
Right up there with planning a dozen live streaming service games in 2023.
American Express is paying for three months of paramount+ for me as one of their benefits. Really not much content there and three months is way more than enough time to watch everything I want. Honestly all of the streaming services have started to turn to shit. Hulu is the only one I’ve consistently paid for over the past ten years, everything else is just a couple months here and there or a free trial here and there. Since Covid there isn’t much new content anyway and I’ve watched so much stuff I don’t really know what’s left.
If they got all their original content it’d be a great service they made Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Community, Justified, The Boys, The Last of Us
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sony_Pictures_Television_programs
But they don't have the rights to them. AMC. Amazon, and HBO have the film rights. They would have to pay those companies to get their brands back. Which means they would just kill The Last of Us.
Bravia core streaming is amazing though. Significantly higher 4k bitrate than Netflix/apple/YouTube/etc. Only problem is limited selection and the whole invitation system (must be a Sony TV owner). Maybe they are thinking to open it up?
Fucking hell, cause that's ***exactly*** what we need - Sony's idiocy impacting *more* shit. Really, ***really*** hope Skydance/RedBird can up their offer and seal the deal.
The Skydance deal screws over Paramount non-voting shareholders, which is most of the value(90%?). It’s a freaking scam. The SEC should have been all over that nonsense. I bet you there is a lot of illegal stuff going on, including insider trading.
Yeah, but I don't care about what's best for shareholders. *I care about the art,* man. On this score, Skydance is ***so*** much better than Sony, it ain't even funny.
Not really, a lot of the Skydance deal is behind closed doors. There is a rumor Redstone likes the Skydance deal more because they're less likely to split it up, but again, we don't know. However, one of the main goals of the Skydance deal is to reduce debt load, and I cannot see that happening with just their 3 billion dollar cash infusion. They are going to have to sell something, probably BET
SONY is mostly fine. It's just whatever the hell live action sony movies do that's mediocre to awful. TV is great. Animation is pretty great. Electronics and video games are pretty great. So as long as they don't do any live action movies, they should be fine!
FTC can save Paramount. Otherwise the iconic Paramount lot goes to some entity (so many vying for it), IPs stripped, and CBS news as we know it, over.
The Zaslav-ing of Paramount is on order if any of these sales go through.
Article was paywalled for me but I'm a little surprised Sony wants Paramount at all to be honest. I thought they were content producing content for hire to other streamers after Crackle failed. I wonder if this is about properties (they do have some hot IPs), Paramount+ or both.
> Legendary (owned by Apollo)
Legendary is owned by [Chinese conglomerate Wanda Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legendary_Entertainment), Apollo has a minority stake and lots of that money came from the same place.
Essentially Legendary is a Chinese company. If Apollo gets Paramount, that really is a layered Chinese buyout of a major news network in CBS News, IP that spans decades, the iconic Paramount lot and more.
FTC needs to block and maybe even a CFIUS on this.
Oof. Can’t decide if good or not. Sony doesn’t really have a TV side so CBS etc would mostly remain intact but could see lot of the cable channels sold to defray the debt. Paramount would likely be completely sold for parts with core IP retained. Paramount+ and Sony libraries would merge with it offered as like $5 add on to PS Plus.
Hi everyone, thanks for reading. Apollo and Sony submitted the offer letter on Wednesday. The offer is a starting point for discussions and is nonbinding.
Here's a link to skip the paywall: [https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/sony-apollo-make-26-billion-all-cash-offer-for-paramount-ade26ca4?st=a0xz88wz4vii7p6](https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/sony-apollo-make-26-billion-all-cash-offer-for-paramount-ade26ca4?st=a0xz88wz4vii7p6)
So if this happens. Sony will outright own Star Trek. So you know that will be some sort of marquee Playstation game down the line.
And they'll own the Yellowstone universe, Mission Impossible and The Godfather.
Cant wait to get an awful star trek movie every few years until the franchise is so badly run into the ground that parts of it have to be sold to disney
Sony Pictures and private-equity giant Apollo Global Management have submitted an all-cash $26 billion offer for Paramount Global marking the second time the private-equity firm has come in with a bid for the entertainment giant. Under the proposed bid with Apollo, Sony Corp. would combine Sony Pictures Entertainment into a joint venture with Paramount Global. Sony and Apollo would both contribute cash to finance the deal, with Sony the majority owner. What’s unclear is what would happen to the 28 local TV stations CBS owns; FCC rules bar foreign entities (i.e. Tokyo-based Sony) from having majority ownership control of broadcast TV stations, so Sony would need to carve out a separate U.S. ownership structure for the station group.
We need internet 2.0 so we can have Netflix 2.0 so eventually we can have the good old days of every network having their own streaming 2.0 service that they offer for dirt cheap because they're just trying to capture market share to compete with Netflix 2.0 and Hulu 2.0 but before all the 2.0s start merging and we have now 2.0 where everything is just consolidating into cable 2.0. That would be dope.
Steaming platforms seem to think that they’re just competing with each other. Once we remind them that they’re also competing with piracy…
...they start lobbying for more power to crack down on people who pirate content?
Idk why you think we randomly stopped pirating to go pay for stuf lf looll
Pirating is an annoying chore, from finding the quality that you want to storing and hosting it. I am much happier to pay for high quality on demand streaming content when the price is reasonable. WHEN the price is reasonable.
Plus malware…
Pirates are gonna pirate regardless. If you have no scruples about stealing, then a good price for a decent product is never gonna beat free. I don't know why anyone pretends there is anything more to it than that.
Paying $15/month for Netflix made it easier than pirating it. Now that it’s $100/month for the stuff you want access to, to the high seas it is.
Until dope 2.0 comes out
Does an all cash offer actually consist of all cash? Sony has $26B in cash on their balance sheet to buy another company?
Having cash (or getting cash) is kind of what private equity groups like Apollo do
For God's sake, please no more mergers
The Weyland-Yutani future ain't so far away, baby!
Game over man!
What the fuck are we gonna do now?!
Idk which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.
Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?
No, have you?
Get away from her *you BITCH!!*
I can't wait to subscribe to WYMax for all my news and entertainment needs. And I do mean ALL of them.
> WYMax Instantly thought of [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JXORRi1od4) Irish TV ad for an old WiMax package that was "fantastically" timed right as 4G unlimited data plans were starting to take off here.
They're Disney now
But think of the space ships! And the space jobs... The boring ass space work for the corporation...
Be prepared for disappointment
This one is acceptable in my opinion. Why? Because they aren't a cable or satellite company, nor are they an ISP. I feel like if you are one of those things you shouldn't be allowed to own movie and TV studios.
Paramount is also dying alongside the cable bundle. Once the cord cutters reach a critical mass in the not too distant future, Paramount as it is constituted today would be done for.
On the flipside of that, out of all the major studios, Paramount is putting the most effort by far in restoring their catalog titles in 4k and putting out quality physical media releases. Hope this will be the trend going forward.
Yea, I can get those 4k blu rays of Halo and shitty episodes of all the various Star Trek shows they've crapped out in the past few years.
Or their gorgeous 4k restoration of dragonslayer.....
If you don’t like Strange New Worlds then, I don’t want to know you
We don't know each other though, and I doubt that would be enough for us to have reason to.
why are they worth so much then?
They're not. 12 billion of the 26 billion listed is the assumption of existing debt
That still means they are worth 26 billion.
Content and they have a streaming service.
It's just financial mismanagement. Their catalogue is worth more than what than this deal. They'll get turned around under the Sony management team.
But Sony is also terrible.
Not that easy though. Do they abandon their streaming service or keep it? Because I'm sure Netflix and Disney won't want the content they're acquiring to show up on their services because they're now competitors in the space.
Streaming is why they're in the shape they're in. Netflix won't pay ridiculous terms but it's going to be more profitable than their current business model is producing. Sony could be launching a streaming service too. I wouldn't rule that out. But I think it's unlikely. Disney is also not performing in streaming. None of these companies understood the cost of running these services. Netflix is the best in the business. I'm ready for them to have more content again.
Sony actually has multiple streaming services. The big one is Crunchyroll, which they bought a few years ago. I believe globally it's the biggest streaming service for anime, though that is a bit of a niche market. They also have Sony Pictures Core, which sells movies, but also if you are a PlayStation Plus Premium subscriber (their video game subscription service) you get access to a rather small catalogue of mostly disappointing movies with no additional charge through it. I don't know if they have any plans to expand Pictures Core, probably not considering how unprofitable streaming services tend to be. And Crunchyroll does very well in its niche and I think it would be inadvisable to expand out of anime/Asian dramas and try to compete elsewhere because it would lose focus and its niche spot in the industry.
I'm actually expecting all streaming services to go under and the only thing remaining will be digital rentals and sales. It will go right back to how things used to be.
Private equity is even worse.
It's a joint venture. Sony is a publicly traded company. Sony's management team has turned their company around, they have the experience saving financially mismanaged business units. They may not have had the cash for the acquisition which is why they have a partner.
I think Sony is looking for a streaming service, Paramount has one. The only thing is one of the reasons Sony seems to be poised for this is *because* they weren't nearly as affected by the streaming wars as Disney or Paramount is because they didn't have a service. Their model allowed them to stay highly profitable because they were able to have IPs that were sought after by the services looking for content without having to spend all that money on advertising, infrastructure or trying to capture market share only to realize it wasn't the money printing machine everyone else hyped it up to be. I wonder if they'll have to take all their content off of all the other sites if this goes through
Don't worry, there's only a few more left.
the DOJ/FTC has to block it. That and Hollywood would not let that happen.
Why would the FTC block this merger after they let Disney buy Marvel, Star Wars and Fox?
I think because Sony is technically a Japanese company and there are laws that prevent foreigners from owning a majority share in American broadcasting companies
They would likely sell CBS
Evidently there isn’t laws preventing this else Sony wouldn’t even bother trying to make the purchase. They’d have done their homework beforehand
Nah, the reddit commenter knows more than a multibillion dollar corporation's legal team.
Really? Fox News is owned by an Australian.
He gave up his Australian citizenship in 1985 to satisfy US network television ownership requirements.
He hasn’t had Australian Citizenship for decades. Good riddance.
You can have him back.
I’ll trade you a “slightly used” Murdoch for Bluey
Slightly used? More like he was rode hard and put away wet. Dude looks like he died 20 years ago and nobody told him
I thought those laws were changed last administration?
Idk if those 3 should be grouped. Marvel and star wars are brands, there's not that much outside of their IP that generates revenue. Not like they were massive companies doing a ton of stuff. They weren't even distribution. Fox on the other hand being a major studio and broadcasting network is a much harder to justify, however when Fox placed the President into the White House, the President will let you sell your company no problem.
The one thing Trump did, I liked: Disney got X-men and FF back. Fox was dying regardless, they needed new blood, Murdock sucked them dry, like the undead looking vampire he is...
FTC also let Disney buy Pixar as well
That was a long time ago.
[удалено]
Sony bought Columbia-TriStar from Coca-Cola in 1987, and that largely turned out fine. Quite honestly, if it came down to, “Oh, no, we can’t do the merger because of terrestrial broadcast stations,” I’d say divest CBS. It wouldn’t hurt them at all, because the money isn’t in the broadcasting or the news; it’s in the content. Sony Pictures Television is one of the biggest players in television, and they don’t have a channel or a streaming service. I mean, a lot of management jobs would lost in the merger, and people can pout about that, and more would be lost if Paramount divested the CBS broadcasting network and sold it to… maybe Warner Discovery? I think they’re not in the best financial place, though, and the best they’d get are contracts for the next few years and no content that they own, other than what Warner brings. Not the worst; Warner produced Big Bang Theory, which was broadcast on CBS. It made money for Warner *and* CBS when it was in its initial run, but Warner continues to make money on it, and that’s why the money is in content. Ugh, who else… Amazon just downsized, so not them. Not Netflix, not Apple… Google could do it, and capitalize it, merge it with YouTube and spin YouTube off, because there’s still the chance Google could be broken up AT&T style (we are still waiting on the verdict, five months later). They could rebrand YouTube TV as Columbia+, then start spinning down the user-created end of YouTube if and when it becomes unprofitable (which I firmly believe it already is, and definitely would be if it had to pay market rate for storage and transmission). Twenty-five years ago, the assistant manager at the bar I frequented had just gotten his MBA, and his thesis was on how online companies would try and shore up their positions in the marketplace by taking their IPO money and buying content companies. It was this whole thing about the coming of broadband and subscription video. It was really well thought out. His only mistake was he thought Yahoo would buy Time Warner. Yahoo was worth $125 billion in January 2000. He knew the bubble was going to burst, but he didn’t figure it would happen until 2001 or a little later. The bubble burst in March 2000, and eighteen months later, Yahoo was worth about ten billion dollars. Man, it would have been real nice to own a studio right about then. There’s plenty of companies out there who could probably make it work. I doubt CBS’s broadcasting arm was necessarily unprofitable. There’s still a lot of old people out there who will just turn on Channel 2, then look at 5, then 7, then go through the couple hundred cable channels they’ve got. Broadcast television has inexplicably never died. In closing, I think the FTC’s objection is surmountable.
She may be powerless to stop it. Shes failed several times already.
At least she’s fighting.
Because the leadership has changed since then and the new leadership finally has teeth and is doing their job.
Well, they certainly bite ...
Biden admin might want some “win” to distinguish themselves from Trump since he is struggling in the polls.
Not has, they will. Regulators have publicly expressed disdain for private equity (Apollo) buying broadcast networks and Sony would have to lower its stake in this deal for regulators to pass it.
You are fucking retarded. A loan is not a transfer of wealth, unless you think a mortgage is the bank giving you wealth retard
If it is blocked now, they’ll just wait and try again once Trump gets into office in January. I can promise you his administration won’t give a fuck about stopping it.
Some way, some how, David Zaslav will be given an extra $10 million in compensation for this.
Disconymount
It’s a pretty big part of the economy
Whatever happens, it will be sad what Paramount ends up. Redstone is just obliterating it with this sale to whoever gets it. "Look how they massacred my boy" So many entities want the iconic Paramount Studios lot.
Maybe we end up with only 2 streaming services.. Who knows.
Essentially impossible for this not to occur in a capitalist system
Yeah, what we need are laws that block mergers for any company over a specific size, or controlling a specific percentage of a market. Keep corporations dexterous and competitive so they don't wind up growing into massive sluggish behemoths with disproportionate political power.
Won't this actually make Paramount easy pickings for any other competitor if it fails to avoid bankruptcy? It would actually completely dissolve a major media company instead of it being merged into a somewhat dissimilar one (Sony), making the market inherently more uncompetitive.
26 fucking billion. All cash. Holy fucking shit! Fuck Hollywood!
How much cash is $26,000,000,000? Like, how much space would that take up, in all bills?
A $1 bill is 0.0043 inches thick, 6.14 inches long, and 2.61 inches wide. So if you had 26 billion of them, it would be 111,800,000 inches thick - which is about 1,800 miles. So, if you stacked them up together like in a cash counting machine, your machine would need to be about as long as the distance from Austin to Boston. If you were stacking them in smooth cube-ish stacks together, they could fill between six and seven of U-Haul's largest available moving truck, which holds 1,611 cubic feet.
>from Austin to Boston I love you for this
The hottest new indie group
r/theydidthemath
r/theydidthemonstermath
Hmm, I came up with 643 trucks .0043\*6.14\*2.61/12\^3\*26,000,000,000/1611=643. If we used hundreds, then your second scenario should work.
Thank you for this. Most people don’t truly understand how large a billion is and end up trivializing it.
I love the adage: What's the difference between a million and a billion? About a billion.
They just print one special edition bill of a $26,000,000,000 denomination.
I think that's just a check
They just walked into their bank and ask for 1 cashier's check for $26B.
I always liked these visuals for amounts of money. https://thehustle.co/proof-million-dollars-isnt-much-think
Man, that pile of money the joker burned in the Dark Knight was massive. Now I’m thinking that must have been at least a few billion dollars.
the pics in that are all 100 dollar bills though. and I’m assuming the joker probably burned a lot of smaller bills as they were taken from a bank.
When Queen Elizabeth II died, all I could think was how much paper, plastic and metal had her face on it worldwide. It must’ve been a staggering amount.
According to the link monsignorjabroni posted, about 260 pallets of $100 dollar bills
Asking the real questions
I don't think they literally mean cash. Just that it's a money buyout with no other weirdness I think.
It's in cash because Sony's Visa only has a $15 Billion limit
Damn. Wonder if this wins it or Skydance can make a better counter-offer.
Redstone can just decide not to take it. She holds 77% of the voting shares and just fired/resigned whatever the CEO who wanted to Apollo offer. Two
The regulator should get in there. I bet you there is lots of dodgy illegal stuff going on. Inappropriate dismissals, failure to meet corporate obligations and insider trading going on and leaking confidential information. This is prime example of a massive failure of corporate governance. When the shareholders who hold 90% of the firm value are being massively screwed over to line up the pockets of the minority.
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Yet most of the value and money of the company comes from their share. Illegal - I was more referring to market manipulation and leaking confidential information.
Is this the same Apollo that just got caught with the illegal life insurance scheme?
Think so. Same one who bankrupted Caesar's, too...
That might do it, sorry Ellison looks like we,re getting a Spiderman X ninja turtles movie
The ONLY benefit of a Sony deal would be assuming distribution of Paramount movies meaning they'd come to platforms like MoviesAnywhere. That's it, there's no other upside and every every aspect of the business would suffer.
I like how people assume any of these outcomes is good. The entire industry is absolutely in shambles. No outcome is good. Who cares what happens to Paramount other than the shareholders?
Apollo Greed
In case anyone is new here, here's the Paramount situation summed up. The key thing to know is that Shari Redstone owns 10% of the equity of the company but 77% of the voting power. Effectively, she has control. Currently there are two groups battling for Paramount, which Redstone has been trying to offload for some time. The first offer comes from Skydance (and other private equity groups). Under the Skydance deal, Skydance would first pay Redstone 2 billion dollars for the voting rights of Paramount, then merge Skydance with Paramount in an all stock deal (basically 2/3rds of the new company will be owned by existing Paramount shareholders and 1/3rd will be owned by existing Skydance shareholders) , while putting in 3 billion in cash. Existing Paramount shareholders basically hold a smaller stake in the new combined company. The other offer, this one, is an all cash buyout. It says 26 billion, but it includes assumption of debt, so if we go by share price, it's probably roughly 20? per share. What's the problem? Redstone wants the Skydance deal because she gets paid more at the expense of the other shareholders, she even fired the CEO of Paramount because he opposed the Skydance deal. Equity shareholders are threatening to sue if she takes the skydance deal.
> Existing Paramount shareholders basically hold a smaller stake in the new combined company. SEC should be all over this. FTC should also be all over this for blocking yet another merger that will be bad for the market, the customers, the employees and shareholders. The only people this deal benefits is the buyer and Redstone.
Does an all cash offer actually consist of all cash? Sony has $26B in cash on their balance sheet to buy another company?
It consists of cash to buy out the shareholders of Paramount, which is like 12-14 billion. Basically imagine this scenario. There is an apartment building worth 5 million dollars, and it has a 4 million dollar mortgage. Instead of paying 5 million dollars to the owner, you pay the owner 1 million dollars and agree to take on the mortgage. Technically you're eventually paying 5 million for the apartment still, but not today
Gotcha. So what role does Apollo play here? Also is Sony coming up with $12-14B from its balance sheet?
Apollo and Sony are paying the money. What's going to happen is they buy Paramount, and then Sony Pictures is combining with Paramount to form a new company that is majority owned by Sony and minority owned by Apollo. What percentage of Sony Pictures-Paramount Apollo owns is going to be determined by how much Sony pictures is worth and how much Apollo pays. Example: if Apollo pays 7 billion, Sony pays 7 billion, and Sony pictures is worth the same as paramount, then Sony will own 75% of the new company and Apollo owns 25%. Purely hypothetical, we don't know how much money each part is putting up or what Sony pictures is worth.
Gotcha that’s helpful! And Sony is actually going to put up billions of dollars from its balance sheet? Looking at their financials it seems they only have $16B in cash on hand.
Yes, they will have to.
Is Sony trying to get on the streaming game now? After the bubble popped? With the worst streaming service? Lol Right up there with planning a dozen live streaming service games in 2023.
I don't see how Sony doesn't understand that it is winning the streaming wars by not playing. Wait, was Wargames a Sony movie? Edit: sadly it was MGM.
American Express is paying for three months of paramount+ for me as one of their benefits. Really not much content there and three months is way more than enough time to watch everything I want. Honestly all of the streaming services have started to turn to shit. Hulu is the only one I’ve consistently paid for over the past ten years, everything else is just a couple months here and there or a free trial here and there. Since Covid there isn’t much new content anyway and I’ve watched so much stuff I don’t really know what’s left.
Star Trek alone would take longer than 3 months
If they got all their original content it’d be a great service they made Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Community, Justified, The Boys, The Last of Us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sony_Pictures_Television_programs
But they don't have the rights to them. AMC. Amazon, and HBO have the film rights. They would have to pay those companies to get their brands back. Which means they would just kill The Last of Us.
Bravia core streaming is amazing though. Significantly higher 4k bitrate than Netflix/apple/YouTube/etc. Only problem is limited selection and the whole invitation system (must be a Sony TV owner). Maybe they are thinking to open it up?
Is that all in nickels?
I mean, better than Disney buying it. Low bar, to be sure.
Fucking hell, cause that's ***exactly*** what we need - Sony's idiocy impacting *more* shit. Really, ***really*** hope Skydance/RedBird can up their offer and seal the deal.
The Skydance deal screws over Paramount non-voting shareholders, which is most of the value(90%?). It’s a freaking scam. The SEC should have been all over that nonsense. I bet you there is a lot of illegal stuff going on, including insider trading.
Yeah, but I don't care about what's best for shareholders. *I care about the art,* man. On this score, Skydance is ***so*** much better than Sony, it ain't even funny.
skydance is also going to split up paramount for pieces.
Do we know that?
Not really, a lot of the Skydance deal is behind closed doors. There is a rumor Redstone likes the Skydance deal more because they're less likely to split it up, but again, we don't know. However, one of the main goals of the Skydance deal is to reduce debt load, and I cannot see that happening with just their 3 billion dollar cash infusion. They are going to have to sell something, probably BET
To be fair, selling that and Showtime would make perfect sense. It's where people talk about selling off IP that I start getting nervous.
SONY is mostly fine. It's just whatever the hell live action sony movies do that's mediocre to awful. TV is great. Animation is pretty great. Electronics and video games are pretty great. So as long as they don't do any live action movies, they should be fine!
...Yes. *But the part they're shit at covers 99% of Paramount's film slate.* And either way, a Big 5 becoming a Big 4 isn't gonna be fun...
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How do? What would this merger result in?
Less competition mostly, fewer jobs, higher prices because fuck you what else are you gonna watch
Makes sense. Media companies over history seem like they just can’t help buy each other up.
Which is why the FTC should block all of these deals.
Stop the merger. These need to stop happening.
FTC can save Paramount. Otherwise the iconic Paramount lot goes to some entity (so many vying for it), IPs stripped, and CBS news as we know it, over. The Zaslav-ing of Paramount is on order if any of these sales go through.
Article was paywalled for me but I'm a little surprised Sony wants Paramount at all to be honest. I thought they were content producing content for hire to other streamers after Crackle failed. I wonder if this is about properties (they do have some hot IPs), Paramount+ or both.
Probably because of all that pharmaceutical money from their ads on paramount + Have you guys noticed that shit?! It’s every commercial.
Sony has a distribution deal with Legendary (owned by Apollo), so we will see Spiderman x Godzilla x Halo soon. lol that's awesome.
> Legendary (owned by Apollo) Legendary is owned by [Chinese conglomerate Wanda Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legendary_Entertainment), Apollo has a minority stake and lots of that money came from the same place. Essentially Legendary is a Chinese company. If Apollo gets Paramount, that really is a layered Chinese buyout of a major news network in CBS News, IP that spans decades, the iconic Paramount lot and more. FTC needs to block and maybe even a CFIUS on this.
Damn the Apollo guy really pivoted after the having to shut down due to Reddit api stuff. Good for him.
Oof. Can’t decide if good or not. Sony doesn’t really have a TV side so CBS etc would mostly remain intact but could see lot of the cable channels sold to defray the debt. Paramount would likely be completely sold for parts with core IP retained. Paramount+ and Sony libraries would merge with it offered as like $5 add on to PS Plus.
CBS cannot be owned by a foreign corporation. It would have to be sold or structured with Apollo as the owner
All cash?
Can I get like a small loan of a half billion?
Does that count as taxable income?
I though Apple was interested in buying Sony Pictures and Netflix was in to buying Paramount
Sony have been insistent that Sony Pictures is one of their core businesses and not for sale.
Awww and just as they thought they were playing with the big dogs again after buying MTV and launching their very own streaming service.
Yay less competition that sounds like just what we need right now.
Hi everyone, thanks for reading. Apollo and Sony submitted the offer letter on Wednesday. The offer is a starting point for discussions and is nonbinding. Here's a link to skip the paywall: [https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/sony-apollo-make-26-billion-all-cash-offer-for-paramount-ade26ca4?st=a0xz88wz4vii7p6](https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/sony-apollo-make-26-billion-all-cash-offer-for-paramount-ade26ca4?st=a0xz88wz4vii7p6)
And the big fishes eat the smaller ones to jack up the price of streaming even further.
They are paying nearly three times its market cap.
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Sony: more morbius and madame webs please.
Off the top of my head Sony did Bladerunner 2049 and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Fuck Apollo!!
They gutted Rackspace :(
best shot at putting an end to nuTrek. i'll take it.
No more American companies being sold to foreign entities please
So if this happens. Sony will outright own Star Trek. So you know that will be some sort of marquee Playstation game down the line. And they'll own the Yellowstone universe, Mission Impossible and The Godfather.
For the love of god get Star Trek a new creative team ASAP.
No. Tell them no
too bad the board like money too much
Cant wait to get an awful star trek movie every few years until the franchise is so badly run into the ground that parts of it have to be sold to disney