Netflix Puts Viacom Under Wall Street’s Spotlight Ahead Of Q1 Earnings Report
Analysts expect to hear encouraging news across the board from the barrage of Big Media Q1 earnings reports and conference calls this week and next. But they’ll be listening especially carefully to Viacom on Wednesday. Its shares — which recently hit all-time highs — are down 3.6% since Monday night, when Netflix said that it will let its streaming deal with Viacom expire next month. Netflix says it would rather secure exclusive rights to particular shows instead of broad deals for shows that also appear on other streaming services including Amazon and Hulu. That worries some investors: Viacom has reassured them that all’s well following Nickelodeon‘s ratings dive last year — and backed up its confidence by promising to repurchase $2.5B in stock this year and pay $1 per share in dividends. The question now is whether Viacom can afford to make good on those vows. “Cash, rather than content, remains king,” Pivotal Research Group’s Brian Wieser says this morning. The Netflix news adds to the concerns about Viacom already held by Bernstein Research’s Todd Juenger — the company’s toughest critic on Wall Street. “We don’t think Netflix will bid a big sum for the specific programs it wants from Viacom,” he says this AM. “If they were willing to do so, they wouldn’t have gone through this exercise.” Nor does Juenger believe that Amazon will become a white knight. It “has all the leverage. Anything they offer to Viacom is better than nothing.” He adds that it would be “the ultimate irony if Viacom claimed the loss of Netflix would help their linear ratings, given years of arguing the opposite.” Others are more sanguine about Viacom’s prospects. Maxim Group’s John Tinker says today that “new entrants to the streaming business” will help the company to “make up the slack.” Wieser also says that “new packagers of content will continue to emerge around the world, providing a base of support for ongoing affiliate fee growth.” UBS Investment Research’s John Janedis notes that Amazon offers 15 of the 29 Nickelodeon programs that are also on Netflix. He says that “shows with the greatest name recognition” — including Rugrats, Fairly Oddparents and Adventures Of Jimmy Neutron – “could move to [Netflix] on an exclusive basis.”
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