Warner Brothers resorts to billion-euro write-down on TV channel
The media conglomerate Warner Brothers Discovery has taken a billion-dollar write-down due to the decline of the traditional TV business. Viewers and advertising dollars are now flowing to streaming services instead of cable TV.
In the USA, Wall Street reacted with a drop of more than eight percent for the share in after-hours trading at times. Warner wrote down 9.1 billion dollars, the equivalent of 7.82 billion Swiss francs, on its TV channels such as CNN and Discovery. In the USA in particular, advertising revenue from linear TV has been falling for a long time, partly because viewers are migrating from cable TV to streaming. Warner also recently lost lucrative broadcasting rights for the US basketball league NBA.
In streaming, the number of Warner customers rose by 3.6 million to 103.3 million within three months. The Group includes the streaming service "Max" with the "HBO" program.
In view of the write-down, Warner posted a quarterly loss of around ten billion dollars following a loss of 1.24 billion dollars in the same quarter of the previous year. Sales fell by six percent year-on-year to 9.7 billion dollars. The TV channel division contributed just under 5.3 billion dollars - eight percent less than a year ago. (SDA/swi)
