Struggle of the Day

For at least the third time in its history, TV3 has approached the government for help.

Newsroom revealed the extent of WBD’s problems back in July when the company filed its annual accounts.

The 2022 before tax loss was $35 million. This followed a $21m loss the previous year. In a note to the accounts, Warner Bros Discovery, the US parent, said it was prepared to guarantee the company’s financial operations for 12 months. […]

Laden with debt TV3 struggled under a succession of private equity owners. While TVNZ poured money into its digital platforms, TV3 underinvested. In December 2020 the television business was bought by Discovery (now WBD) for $20 million.

The expected investment in digital has so far not eventuated.

With more and more people accessing news and content via digital means, things are not looking good for the media company.

TV3’s digital platform, Three Now, has been left to battle on with lower impact programming and inferior technology against TVNZ+ and the other streaming services.

This year TV3 has been chopping cost out of its free-to-air operations with a sinking lid policy on staffing impacting Newshub and other departments at the network.

WBD, it seems, is investing its interests elsewhere:

Instead, WBD has extended and enhanced its deal with SKY. WBD supplies premium content to SKY’s Neon channel and has other specialty channels like CNN on Sky’s platform.


Newsroom

The market cap of WBD is 31 billion USD.

Read more here. Discuss it on the BFD.