Paul Gluckman

MobiTV has $19 million in assets and $75 million in liabilities, said the privately held streaming video provider in Chapter 11 papers (in Pacer) filed Monday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware (docket 21-10457). The company incurred a $34 million operating loss for 2020 on revenue of $13.5 million. It generates revenue through “transportation rights” contracts with more than 120 pay-TV providers to deliver streaming content to 300,000 “end-user subscribers,” it said. T-Mobile, a key benefactor, agreed Jan. 29 to give MobiTV $2.5 million in “bridge financing” it said. MobiTV hired FTI Consulting to find a buyer, hoping to avoid the bankruptcy, but was unsuccessful, it said. It continues to employ FTI with the goal of “reengaging parties who originally showed interest,” plus finding “new potential buyers,” it said. MobiTV’s Chapter 11 petition (in Pacer) lists web-hosting company Rackspace as its top creditor, with $4 million owed on an Oct. 9 loan. No. 2 creditor Silicon Valley Bank is owed $3.06 million for an April 21 Paycheck Protection Program loan under the Cares Act. MobiTV said the bank denied its request for loan forgiveness. MPEG LA, the third-largest creditor, is owed $2.91 million in unpaid license fees, said the petition. MobiTV’s other top creditors include streaming content partners ABC Cable Networks Group ($362,000 owed), Fox News ($350,000), A&E ($90,000), MTV ($84,000) and Discovery Communications ($83,000). MobiTV was “incurring substantial operating losses,” despite “growing revenue and increasing subscriber and customer bases,” said the court papers. Though MobiTV “projected significant and material subscriber and revenue growth” entering 2020, the pandemic “materially impaired” growth opportunities, it said. The board approved the Chapter 11 filing in late January, it said.

The California Consumer Privacy Act and California Privacy Rights Act “could mark the beginning of a trend toward more stringent privacy legislation” in the U.S., reported Vizio’s initial public stock offering registration Monday. "CCPA has prompted a number of proposals for federal and state privacy legislation that, if passed, could increase our potential liability, add layers of complexity to compliance in the U.S. market, increase our compliance costs and adversely affect our business.” Vizio has “historically maintained,” and consumers have come to expect, “extensive backward compatibility for our older products and the software that supports them, allowing older products to continue to benefit from new software updates,” said the IPO. “In the near term, this backward compatibility will no longer be practical or cost-effective, and we may decrease or discontinue service for our older products.” 2020 profit soared 344% to $102.5 million on an 11% revenue gain to $2.04 billion. Vizio shipped 7.1 million smart TVs last year, up 20%. The company pulled an earlier IPO when it signed a 2016 deal to be bought by LeEco for $2 billion. The agreement later fell apart.

AT&T selling a minority stake in DirecTV to TPG (see our report here, news release here) drew speculation about the video business that's being spun off eventually being combined with Dish Network. Meanwhile, AT&T told us it will file satellite license transfer applications with the FCC to assign operations to DirecTV. A Barclays analyst asked during a Thursday conference call if the TPV deal has any provision about how the ownership of the entity would be shared in any future DirecTV-Dish. “There's a lot of different terms and conditions in it and a lot of different scenarios that might be out there, none of which I'm going to talk about,” AT&T CEO John Stankey said: “If something else occurs, we get 70% of ultimately the value,” the stake the telco keeps. Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen thinks a future DirecTV-Dish is “inevitable” (see 2011060043). A Dish spokesperson declined to comment. The transaction “is better than it seems for AT&T, but only if there is a subsequent value-enhancing transaction (like a merger with Dish),” theorized New Street Friday. “We are confident that this transaction was set up as a precursor to a second transaction, presumably a combination with Dish.” The deal foretells “more wheeling and dealing ahead,” likely putting DirecTV’s “popular but costly” NFL Sunday Ticket service "into play," wrote GlobalData senior analyst Tammy Parker.

Paramount+ arrives in the "streaming space" March 4 “with real advantages that our competitors do not have,” said ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish in a virtual investor day presentation Wednesday. “As the streaming segment continues to evolve and mature, we believe consumers will increasingly be looking for the combination of genres that have long made linear television popular.” Paramount+ will be the first streaming service “that can do it at scale” in each major genre, from live sports to news to episodic TV to movies, “all in one place,” said Bakish. Some of the “biggest, most anticipated” new Paramount feature films will go exclusively to Paramount+ 30 to 45 days after their theatrical release, he said. All other new Paramount movies will appear on Paramount+ after their theatrical run, “some as early as 90 days,” he said. “New movies from MGM will also appear on Paramount+ during the pay one window.” All ViacomCBS studios also “are ramping up production to provide a continuous flow of new original movies made exclusively for Paramount+,” he said. New content “will be underpinned” by a library of more than 2,500 films from Paramount, Miramax “and a number of other leading Hollywood studios,” he said.

Consumers are becoming “increasingly digitized” during COVID-19 stay-at-home protocols, and consumer awareness about the need for online security “continues to increase,” said McAfee CEO Peter Leav on a quarterly call Tuesday. “These trends will continue to fuel the growth of an already large addressable market.” A McAfee-commissioned survey of 11,000 internet-connected adults globally found “high levels of concern around cyber risks and online crime,” said Leav. “Proliferation of devices within the household, increased internet connectivity, the explosive growth in online transactions, the use of personal information in those transactions and more work-from-home policies” drove higher security software purchases among consumers, he said. “The study also showed a broad increase in the usage of online banking, online financial planning, online doctor visits and personal shopping, with the expectations that post-pandemic, these activities will remain at high levels.” McAfee's consumer revenue grew 23% in fiscal Q4, ended Dec. 26, and it added 668,000 “net new core direct-to-consumer subscribers,” similar to its net adds in Q3, said Leav.

Cinedigm quarterly revenue fell 14% to $10 million from the year-ago quarter due to COVID-19's impact on the theatrical equipment business, the company reported Monday. Its net loss soared 377% to $9.7 million. The stock fell 18% Tuesday to $1.57. Streaming is the fastest-growing segment of the entertainment business, said CEO Chris McGurk on a Q3 call Monday. The company opposes “participating directly” in the big streaming wars, he said. “Companies like Netflix and Disney and Comcast are spending billions of dollars on original content and marketing to try to build massive subscriber bases at the expense of each other.” Cinedigm focuses “on building out a widely distributed portfolio of more targeted streaming channels” to appeal to “specific enthusiast audiences,” he said. Cinedigm's strategy “is not competitive with the expensive subscription-focused Netflix and Disney+ and Peacock and all of the other major media, general entertainment channels that are at war with each other for subscribers,” said McGurk. “Our targeted enthusiast-channel approach is a perfectly complementary strategy to that of the major media, general entertainment streaming channels.”

AMC Entertainment stock closed 17.7% higher Tuesday, after the theater chain hailed New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) decision greenlighting the March 5 reopening of cinemas in New York City. Cuomo’s executive order Monday put theaters in the five boroughs in line with most cinemas elsewhere in the state that were allowed to reopen with limited capacities in late October. Theaters in the city have been shuttered since the first COVID-19 lockdown orders took effect March 22 statewide. Theater restrictions will be uniform statewide, including mandatory masks and preassigned socially distanced seating, said Cuomo. Attendance will be limited to 25% of capacity or 50 people per screen, whichever is smaller, he said. AMC will reopen all 13 of its locations in the city when the restrictions lift March 5, said CEO Adam Aron. S&P at least twice downgraded the stock, warning investors AMC was precariously close to running out of cash amid COVID-19 theater closures and the pullback of major film slates from in-person audiences (see 2101220036). The New York development is a “ray of light” for AMC, Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter wrote investors Tuesday. The move could entice other densely populated areas to reopen and lead to studios maintaining Q2-Q3 film slate release plans, he said. The analyst tempered remarks about pent-up demand saying people may remain reluctant to attend movies until they get inoculated for protection against COVID-19. Pachter stood by his comments Monday (see 2102220052) that he doesn’t expect movie attendance to begin returning to normal before July.

Discovery+ is “off and running” to a “fantastic start” seven weeks into its Jan. 4 launch (see 2012020049), said Discovery CEO David Zaslav on a Q4 call Monday, typifying superlatives from top executives about the early fate of the fledgling streaming service. It's on track to reach 12 million direct-to-consumer paid subscribers globally by the end of the week “across our entire portfolio,” a net increase of 7 million since December, he said. “The vast majority of this increase is attributable to discovery+.” Its rollout “has been nearly flawless,” he said. The service launched on all major smart TV platforms and devices, he said. “Stay tuned for further delivery partnerships, such as partnerships with cable operators and other connected TV platforms.” The company is partnering with Verizon on the U.S. discovery+ launch, Sky in the U.K. and Ireland, and Vodafone in some European markets. All “key operating metrics” about discovery+ are “pointing in the right direction,” he said. Strong subscriber “retention” is evident, he said. The company is encouraged by “good numbers about people once they know about” discovery+, he said. Management rebuffed analysts’ requests for discovery+ forecasts. “We’re still not in a position to give long-term or short-term subscriber guidance,” said Chief Financial Officer Gunnar Wiedenfels. “We’re super-happy with what we’re seeing, top to bottom, ahead of expectations. We have a lot of distribution still coming down the pike. We’re really just getting started internationally, so that’s on the positive side. I don’t think there’s a lot of value of us discussing scenarios here.” The stock closed 8.9% higher Monday at $55.29.

Getting a big city “up and operational” with a “beta” 5G service will be Dish Network’s “first major milestone” in its deployment buildout, Chairman Charlie Ergen told a Q4 call Monday. “As we open up our first city, we’ll have problems," he said. "We’ll drop a call. Something could go wrong that we didn’t expect, and then that’s where we find out how our team and our vendors work together to solve those problems."

With broadening adoption of 5G handsets, “silicon content in smartphones is growing at double-digit [percentage] rates,” said Applied Materials CEO Gary Dickerson on a quarterly call Thursday. Historic pandemic-fueled spikes in consumer and enterprise demand for technology are “irreversible, since new ways of working offer compelling advantages in terms of time and productivity,” he said. “Within the electronics ecosystem itself, key technology inflections are driving increasing silicon consumption.” Companies are “rethinking and reengineering the way they operate and there's an immense pull for advanced technology,” said Dickerson. “Consumers are making different choices about the way they spend their time, and the products and services they buy.” Revenue for the quarter ended Jan. 31 was a record $5.16 billion, up 24% year over year. The stock closed 5.3% higher Friday at $119.46.