Why media keeps merging (and failing)
How media’s obsession with “efficiency” keeps killing creativity.
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“The only people who wind up in the positive zone on a lot of these moves from Wall Street are the bankers, the accountants and the lawyers.”
This week on The Media Odyssey Podcast,
and I talk about mergers and acquisitions, the kind that make headlines but rarely make sense.Because if you look at the last decade of media consolidation, one pattern repeats: the CFO always wins.
The result? An industry run by people whose job is to cut, not to build.
We start with Warner Bros. Discovery, a company now rumoured to merge again. The same logic runs through every corner of the market: Disney-Fox, Paramount-Skydance, Viacom-CBS, AT&T-Warner. Each promised “synergies.” Each ended with layoffs and creative paralysis.
Across the Atlantic, the pattern rhymes but doesn’t repeat. MFE is building a pan-European empire while RTL retreats into Germany and finalises its merger with Sky. One bets on scale. The other bets on focus. Both are reacting to pressure from global players but neither has cracked the question that matters most: how do you go mainstream without your local touch?
Canal+ may be the outlier. Its takeover of MultiChoice wasn’t about short-term balance sheets (MultiChoice lost 1.2M in 12 months) but about reach, a strategic move into markets that still have room to grow. That kind of vision has become rare.
We finally look ahead to where this cycle leads. Production companies like Banijay or Lionsgate could be the next targets, not because they’re broken, but because the platforms need creative engines they no longer know how to build themselves.
CFOs can calculate a merger. They can’t program culture.
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That’s it for today but before you go:
