Puck

1 day ago | puck.news | John Ourand

Over the past half-decade, as our media transformation has played out in Hemingway-esque terms—gradually and then very rapidly—a couple of truths have become self-evident. First, as we all know, live sports have become the coin of the realm. These days, middle schoolers can practically recite the rights fee that Netflix paid for its Christmas Day football doubleheader, or what Amazon forked over for its Black Friday contest.

2 days ago | puck.news | Julia Alexander

Even now, more than half a decade after everyone piled into the streaming video race, no company comes close to commanding the level of subscribers, revenue, or engagement that Netflix and YouTube enjoy. Of course, a significant part of that is first-mover advantage. But equally important is that, from the get-go, these companies seemed to grasp that advancing technology would change consumer behavior in transformative ways.

2 days ago | puck.news | William Cohan

It’s been almost a year since the Ellisons and RedBird Capital struck a deal to merge Skydance Media into Paramount Global, while simultaneously recapitalizing the company and keeping it publicly traded under their control. Any deal where a broadcast license changes hands—in this case, CBS’s—can take a while to receive the necessary regulatory approvals. When GE sold NBCUniversal to Comcast more than a decade ago, some 14 months passed between signing and closing.

3 days ago | puck.news | John Heilemann

For the duration of Barack Obama’s two terms in office, Robert Wolf was perhaps the only Wall Street mover and shaker in the White House orbit whom Obama actually liked. In the run-up to the 2008 presidential primaries, Wolf, then serving as chairman and C.E.O. of UBS Americas, had been at the forefront of a generational shift in the allegiances of Democratic megadonors, enabling Obama to build the fundraising juggernaut that helped beat Hillary Clinton.

3 days ago | puck.news | Julia Alexander

Measuring sports viewership in the post-TV era has become, in the words of Media Rating Council’s George Ivie, “more chaotic than it’s ever been.” Amid this chaos, and the fact that some audience segments are more valuable than others, league executives are being forced to rethink how they cut media deals, and advertisers are trying to figure out how to deploy their budgets while the ground is shifting beneath them.