Consolidation isn’t new in the OTT industry – think AT&T and Time Warner (2018) or Comcast and Sky (also 2018) – but the last couple of weeks has seen a flurry of activity including the AT&T / Discovery deal, the acquisition of MGM by Amazon and the coming together of France’s TF1 and M6. The UK’s competition watchdog has also recently (and provisionally) cleared the proposed merger between Virgin Media and O2. What’s going on? That was the subject of this week’s OTT Question Time (Thurs 3rd June, 4pm).
Together with Matt Rothman, Managing Partner at Hemisphere Capital, Gulliver Smithers, CTO at RampRate IT and former SVP Product & Technology at Sony Pictures International, and Alan Wolk, co-founder and Lead Analyst at TVREV, we talked about industry mega-mergers and explored:
- Why all of this activity is happening now
- The impetus for these deals and how valuations are derived
- Wider OTT / media M&A trends
- The outlook for film studios and the world’s big commercial broadcasters
- And, of course, the Streaming Wars
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ABOUT KAUSER KANJI
Kauser Kanji has been working in online video for 19 years, formerly at Virgin Media, ITN and NBC Universal, and founded VOD Professional in 2011. He has since completed major OTT projects for, amongst others, A+E Networks, the BBC, BBC Studios, Channel 4, DR (Denmark), Liberty Global, Netflix, Sony Pictures, the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation and UKTV. He now writes industry analyses, hosts an online debate show, OTT Question Time, as well as its in-person sister event, OTT Question Time Live.