NEW YORK—Echoing comments made earlier this month by senior executives at Disney and Fox during quarterly earnings calls, Warner Bros. Discovery president and CEO David Zaslav is insisting that their new sports streaming joint venture would not increase cord cutting.
“We don't see a lot of people unsubscribing to cable in order to get this,” Zaslav said during the WBD Q4 2023 earnings call with analysts. “We're going after the 60 million plus doors that are -- they're not thinking about getting cable when they get their own apartments.”
“Look, there's about 125 million households in America and there's more than 60 million of those that are not in the traditional bundled cable ecosystem,” Zaslav also said. “And we see that with things like Bleacher Report, where we have 30 million people mostly under 30 that the overwhelming majority are not in the traditional cable universe, but they love sports. They're on Bleacher and House of Highlights all day. And so we have a very rich target of over 60 million people that love sports. And it's a product that's quite modern.”
Zaslav was not asked by analysts about the Fubo lawsuit against the JV partners Disney, WBD and Fox alleging antitrust violations.
In terms of the ongoing negotiations with the NBA to renew the TNT NBA rights, Zaslav said “We have a strong positive 40-year relationship with the NBA. And in terms of our NBA rights, we are now fully engaged in renewal discussions, and they are constructive and productive. Our global sports portfolio continues to provide real meaningful value to all of our platforms.”
During the call WBD CFO added that in terms of the NBA, “as you know, we're in the middle of exclusive discussions here, so I want to lift it up maybe one level to a general statement on how we look at sports rights. We're spending close to $20 billion sort of, on content and programming in the broadest sense, and every dollar we spend plays a different role across the portfolio. We generally like to own our content. That's not the case with sports, but we obviously acknowledge the enormous value, reach value, emotional value of these deals. And we have been able to strike profitable deals and we're always going to be disciplined. It's very easy to lose control over sports rights investments. That's not what we do. We're going -- we know exactly what value we assign and we stay disciplined during our discussions….And if you take that into account, I think we have enormous opportunity to be much more efficient with our content spend overall across the entire company, and that will include certain areas in which, you're right, you probably have to assume that there is inflation going forward. On the NBA specifically, we've had a very, very strong partnership for 40 years, and I certainly hope that we're going to be able to continue that in the most positive way.”
The NBA reportedly wants $75 billion for its U.S. media rights. Potential bidders for the rights currently held by WBD’s TNT include Disney, which also has rights to games on ABC and ESPN, as well as Amazon and NBCU.
