October 30, 2025 • 15 mins
On today's episode, Naveen Sarma, managing director of S&P Global and sector lead for U.S. media and telecom, unpacks his recent report on the second half of the year, which has some good news and some concerning news for Hollywood and related sectors.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome to Daily Variety, your daily dose of news and
analysis for entertainment industry insiders. It's Thursday, October thirtieth, twenty
twenty five. I'm your host, Cynthia Littleton. I am co
editor in chief of Variety alongside Ramin Situta. I'm in
la He's in New York, and Variety has reporters around
the world covering the business of entertainment. In today's episode,
(00:31):
we'll take a big picture look at what to expect
for the industry for the rest of this year and
into twenty twenty six. We'll talk to Navin Sarma, Managing
director of SMP Global, who is the sector lead for
US Media and Telecom at the respected data and analytics company.
Navin recently published a report that has some good news
and some concerning news for media and entertainment. We'll unpack
(00:54):
it all, but before we get to that, here are
a few headlines just in this morning that you need
to know. The big news in Hollywood is what a
great time was had by all at Variety's Power of
Women event last night in Beverly Hills. It was really something.
The beautiful ballroom was packed with so many insiders. I
needed many more hours to do. All the schmooz Our
(01:16):
honorees were a wonderful combination of inspiring, funny, gracious and fierce,
and so were the presenters. All of our coverage and
copious amounts of video are available right now on Variety
dot com. And whatever you do, don't skip Sharon Stone's
introduction for honoree Sidney Sweeney. It was hot in other
(01:37):
news this morning, and there really is other news. This morning,
Comcasts delivered a less than stellar third quarter earnings report.
There's softness in the broadband numbers. The company also appointed
a new head of its cable and Connectivity division, Steve Crony,
who takes over from longtime head Dave Watson. As we expected,
Comcasts top leaders Brian Roberts and Mike Cavanaugh dods about
(02:01):
their interest in joining the bidding war for Warner Brothers Discovery,
but Kavanaugh did make a point of noting that the
company's ability to secure regulatory approval for a big transaction
will improve considerably once the Versanth spinoff of the NBC
universal cable channels is complete. It will be a much
smaller company at that point. However, there is still the
(02:23):
issue of President Donald Trump's open hostility to Comcast. We'll
see if that changes it all after Comcast spins out
MSNBC and other cablers into Versant. Meanwhile, Fox delivered a
mixed bag of a quarter, with higher revenue offset by
higher expenses. The bright spot for Fox was to be
the ad supported streamer reached the profitability mark earlier than expected.
(02:45):
That's never a bad thing. All of these stories in
our analysis and so much more can be found on
Variety dot com. Right now, Now we turn to a
conversation with an industry leader about news and trends and
show business. Today we'll hear from Navin Sarma, Managing Director
(03:05):
and Sector lead for US Media and Telecom for their
respected data and analytics firm, SMP Global. Navin has been
a regular on Daily Variety's sibling podcast, Strictly Business, so
we're excited to welcome here to Daily Variety Today. Here
he breaks down the key points that he made in
a recent report about the sector trends he's seeing so
far in the second half of twenty twenty five. Navin Sarma,
(03:28):
Managing Director and Sector lead of US Media and Telecom
for SMP Global, thank you for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Thank you very much for having me well.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Navin. You put out a sector report that was looking
at the second half of the year for media and
entertainment and what you were seeing shaping up in a
year that has been nothing but unpredictable. I thought there
was stuff in the report that is going to be
nailbiting for Hollywood and stuff that was very encouraging, including
(03:58):
your first basic conclusion is that the extremely high demand
for content brings stability to this sector despite all of
the disruption that's going on. Fundamentally, people want to be
entertained and that is the demand curve that Hollywood can
lean on. In your report, you're talking about film, episodic TV, music,
(04:18):
video games, sports, leagues, concerts, books, newspapers, magazines, and even
consumer generated content.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Right, So consumers continue to want to consume that kind
of content. The problem is there's only twenty four hours
in the day, and so there's become more fragmentation. The
model that made Hollywood work so well and so profitably
was you made a piece of content and then you
monetize it across what we would call a matrix, right,
multiple geographies and multiple platforms. That hasn't been fixed with
(04:50):
the launch of streaming. Yes, their content is being monetized globally.
But the multiple platform thing where you put on television,
you put in the theaters, you sold it to multiple
media companies, that still hasn't been fixed, and so that's
still a problem in terms of being profitable. In addition,
when you look at especially like the large US media companies,
(05:11):
while they're growing their profitability on the streaming side, they're
still dealing with the overall of the kind of linear television.
And you know, linear television at one point, you know,
in some cases had forty eight to fifty percent margins
and those margins are coming down dramatically, and so that
need that trends still leads to clear where linear television
either stabilizes or disappears and streaming profitability takes off. Before
(05:36):
you start to see a reversal and margins start to
really improve for the media companies.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
There's no conversation about global financial markets would be complete
without discussing AI. It still feels like we're in the
stage of boy, there's a lot of promise on the horizon,
but what is actually happening now? Are you seeing anybody
at a few basis points or at a few percentages
to their margin because of AI savings.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Not yet. In our conversations with the companies the studios,
they've talked about the potential to get significant savings both
on the pre production side as well as on the
post production side. Whether that translates to the studios having
greater return on their production, I don't know. Those savings
(06:21):
might get rolled up and put back into more productions.
So for the money that's saved on a particular movie,
you might get put back into additional films, so you
might get an increase in the number of films or
TV shows being made, or it may go go to
paying for talent. So it isn't clear to me yet
that these savings are going to show up in the
(06:42):
bottom line, but the companies are talking about it, and
at some point in the next couple of years you'll
start to see that impact and it'll probably start to
quantify how much savings this means on the bottom line
for their content creation.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Another key point you make is about just in general,
the much increased focus on profitability for streamers, and you,
like many others, very flatly note that Netflix has quote
an insurmountable lead compared to its in industry rivals end quote,
three hundred million global subscribers operating margins of just over
(07:16):
thirty percent. Do you see anybody else getting near that
in five years?
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Not from the legacy media companies. So Disney clearly has
taken on the strategy. They aren't necessarily trying to be Netflix,
but they certainly have the global scale and the content
to be able to, you know, be a strong number
two or number three. But you certainly have Amazon who
could do that, Apple could do that. The other guys,
(07:44):
the legacy media companies don't have the global scale right,
and frankly they're not really pursuing it, whether it's Peacock
that has saying primarily in the US and will do
joint ventures overseas or Paramount which is in a many
of the English language countries but hasn't really gone beyond that.
And so that limitation itself, the fact that they're not
(08:04):
three hundred million subscribers in two hundred territories limits their
ability to get economies of scale, and so you might
see this is where mergers make sense, where you can
get scaled domestically but also overseas, where they might be
able to try to get to the same profitability levels
as a Disney or a Netflix down the road.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Do you see Disney Plus as having a lot of
runway internationally?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Yes, Disney has an incredibly strong brand, and I know
that they're not planning on going to every market, but
they certainly could offered their services, whether it's through a
joint venture or through them launching their own streaming service
in a particular country globally, So yeah, they could in
theory get to that kind of scale.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Let's move to advertising. You say advertising remains solid after
a shaky start to the year. Now, it's a pretty
grim forecast for linear TV. National TV U forecast to
be down about seven point four percent for the year.
That's not a surprise coming off a political year as
well as the Olympics last August. Local TV is a
(09:08):
little bit better, but also with three percent decline. Digital,
of course, no surprise is your forecasting nine point five
percent growth for the year, and for streaming specifically, the
number is twenty percent to zero, up five point five
percent from your previous forecast. Now, Vin, what's going on here?
Speaker 2 (09:27):
If you go back to the beginning of the year
and the threat of tariffs, advertisers were concerned that tariffs
would have a huge impact on the economy, consumers would
cut back on spending, and so there was a pause
in March in to April where advertisers basically said, let's
like a pause on this and see where the economy
is going. And they came back pretty quickly. The one
(09:51):
thing about advertising today, especially on digital platforms, is it
can get placed very very quickly, and so the old
days where it took months to place, and so it
was a trailer indicator of economic activity, that's kind of ended,
and so advertisers can turn on and off Di Spiggot
relatively quickly, and so they did, and it stayed relatively
healthy the rest of the year. In general, the economy
is doing relatively well, especially when you consider how it's
(10:13):
comparing to the rest of the world. And advertisers have
learned over the years. If you look at the pandemic, if
you don't advertise, you lose market share when the economy
returns and people start spending. So advertisers have continued to
spend and it's benefited connected TV and clearly linear television
will continue to lose advertising. But if you're a media
(10:35):
company and you sell linear television and connected TV advertising
together and aggregate. That's growth, right, So it's a share shift,
but the media companies are benefiting from that because they're
getting the streaming advertising as well.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
It's an attention economy and the dollars follow the eyeballs.
Your last item is of course about M and A,
which is also something that has consumed a lot of
people at Variety following the bouncing ball of the Paramount
Skydance transaction, and now just as the dust settle there,
stirred it up about Paramount possibly going after Warner Brothers Discovery,
possibly others jumping in bring barring in a different transaction.
(11:12):
Warner Brothers Discovery is on track to separate CNN and
TNT and a bunch of they're well established declining leading
or cable channels off into a separate company. NBC Universal
is also well along on such a spin off that
they're gonna call Versant Media Group. In the harsh light
of seeing companies that are divesting, you know, big media
(11:33):
companies are divesting these assets, I have to ask the
skeptical question, what is going to be the reception to
these Are they going to be seen as a well
built but listing ocean liner.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
That's a good question. I'm not an equity analyst, so
I can't talk about how the equity is going to perform.
But from a credit standpoint, the question we're getting asked
by investors is how long are these businesses going to last?
Is it ten years? Is five years? Is it twelve years?
You know, to make a comparison, It's kind of like
yellow pages and newspapers, right, it's a decline? Can they
(12:05):
manage that decline? And that decline in the cash flow?
What creditors want to know is can they get repaid?
You're not going to see these companies go out and
do ten year or fifteen year bonds because who knows
what the world is going to work like in ten
or fifteen years. They're going to be shorter duration and
probably more focused on bank debt, which will amortize and
they can pay that off quickly. Right, they can pay
(12:26):
it off as a generating cash flow. So as long
as they're generating cash flow as you can connaite to
finance these businesses. But as Ebadatic lines, the amount of
debt that public shareholders, private bondholders, private debt holders are
willing to put into this company will continue to shrike,
and the question is how long will will that go on?
You know, Yellow Pages companies are still around, and our
(12:49):
newspaper companies are still around, and so it doesn't just
dive off a cliff. It takes time, and so the
question is how long is that going to take?
Speaker 1 (12:57):
At some point it just becomes math. Let me button
up by asking you, I mean, how is what's going
on in the credit marketplace and with interest rates? How
is that impacting the level of M and A going
on in media and telecom? Do you think would there
be more activity if things felt a little more stable.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Interest rates are interesting because interesting treasury rates are high
today versus where they were five years ago. So the
spread between the treasuries and where corporate debt trades are
at historic lows. The challenge for a lot of these
companies and the big investment grade companies have less need
(13:35):
for financing unless they're doing M and A, and so
you know they benefit from that. But if you look
at a lot of the smaller companies who are going
through refinancings, there's a lot of questions about long term
viability of some of these sectors, especially legacy media, and
so the interest rates that they have to pay to
refinanced debt is staggering. It's nine percent, it's ten percent.
(13:57):
My parents would say that, you know, these are rates
that they saw back in the sey.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Right, and that right on its face, is just prohibitive.
You can't do it right. Noven, thank you so much.
You're in the thick of media earning season. I really
appreciate you taking this time out to talk with us.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
You're very welcome.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
As we close out today's episode, here's a few things
we're watching for. Here comes Stranger Things. The season five
trailer is out and it looks spooky good. The first
four episodes drop on Netflix on November twenty six, but
you already know that because you read about it earlier
this month in Variety's cover story with the Duffer Brothers.
Here comes the American Film Market. The annual Film Market
(14:40):
is back to Los Angeles after shifting to Las Vegas
last year. Nobody liked the vibe in Sin City, so
they're posting up at the Century Plaza Hotel this time around. Somehow,
I feel like the AFM is just going to continue
to keep moving west, and in a few years it'll
probably be back in Santa Monica, where it was held
for decades. Starting tomorrow, we'll produce the first of two
(15:01):
digital dailies out of the h Lava Documentary Film Festival
in the Czech Republic, and next week we'll be in
Taiwan covering the Taiwan Creative Content Fest. You can find
all of that coverage on Variety dot com under the
Global tab. Before we go, Happy birthday greetings going out
to Variety's Michelle Sabrino Stearns. We can't wait to see
(15:21):
what the coming year brings for our fearless leader as
she segues into a new chapter of her career. Rock
on MSS. Thanks for listening. This episode was written and
reported by me Cynthia Littleton Stick Snack's hick Picks. Please
leave us a review at the podcast platform of your choice,
and please tune in Monday for another episode of Daily
Variety and once again for all the marbles, Go Dodgers.
Welcome to Daily Variety, your daily dose of news and
analysis for entertainment industry insiders. It's Thursday, October thirtieth, twenty
twenty five. I'm your host, Cynthia Littleton. I am co
editor in chief of Variety alongside Ramin Situta. I'm in
la He's in New York, and Variety has reporters around
the world covering the business of entertainment. In today's episode,
(00:31):
we'll take a big picture look at what to expect
for the industry for the rest of this year and
into twenty twenty six. We'll talk to Navin Sarma, Managing
director of SMP Global, who is the sector lead for
US Media and Telecom at the respected data and analytics company.
Navin recently published a report that has some good news
and some concerning news for media and entertainment. We'll unpack
(00:54):
it all, but before we get to that, here are
a few headlines just in this morning that you need
to know. The big news in Hollywood is what a
great time was had by all at Variety's Power of
Women event last night in Beverly Hills. It was really something.
The beautiful ballroom was packed with so many insiders. I
needed many more hours to do. All the schmooz Our
(01:16):
honorees were a wonderful combination of inspiring, funny, gracious and fierce,
and so were the presenters. All of our coverage and
copious amounts of video are available right now on Variety
dot com. And whatever you do, don't skip Sharon Stone's
introduction for honoree Sidney Sweeney. It was hot in other
(01:37):
news this morning, and there really is other news. This morning,
Comcasts delivered a less than stellar third quarter earnings report.
There's softness in the broadband numbers. The company also appointed
a new head of its cable and Connectivity division, Steve Crony,
who takes over from longtime head Dave Watson. As we expected,
Comcasts top leaders Brian Roberts and Mike Cavanaugh dods about
(02:01):
their interest in joining the bidding war for Warner Brothers Discovery,
but Kavanaugh did make a point of noting that the
company's ability to secure regulatory approval for a big transaction
will improve considerably once the Versanth spinoff of the NBC
universal cable channels is complete. It will be a much
smaller company at that point. However, there is still the
(02:23):
issue of President Donald Trump's open hostility to Comcast. We'll
see if that changes it all after Comcast spins out
MSNBC and other cablers into Versant. Meanwhile, Fox delivered a
mixed bag of a quarter, with higher revenue offset by
higher expenses. The bright spot for Fox was to be
the ad supported streamer reached the profitability mark earlier than expected.
(02:45):
That's never a bad thing. All of these stories in
our analysis and so much more can be found on
Variety dot com. Right now, Now we turn to a
conversation with an industry leader about news and trends and
show business. Today we'll hear from Navin Sarma, Managing Director
(03:05):
and Sector lead for US Media and Telecom for their
respected data and analytics firm, SMP Global. Navin has been
a regular on Daily Variety's sibling podcast, Strictly Business, so
we're excited to welcome here to Daily Variety Today. Here
he breaks down the key points that he made in
a recent report about the sector trends he's seeing so
far in the second half of twenty twenty five. Navin Sarma,
(03:28):
Managing Director and Sector lead of US Media and Telecom
for SMP Global, thank you for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Thank you very much for having me well.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Navin. You put out a sector report that was looking
at the second half of the year for media and
entertainment and what you were seeing shaping up in a
year that has been nothing but unpredictable. I thought there
was stuff in the report that is going to be
nailbiting for Hollywood and stuff that was very encouraging, including
(03:58):
your first basic conclusion is that the extremely high demand
for content brings stability to this sector despite all of
the disruption that's going on. Fundamentally, people want to be
entertained and that is the demand curve that Hollywood can
lean on. In your report, you're talking about film, episodic TV, music,
(04:18):
video games, sports, leagues, concerts, books, newspapers, magazines, and even
consumer generated content.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Right, So consumers continue to want to consume that kind
of content. The problem is there's only twenty four hours
in the day, and so there's become more fragmentation. The
model that made Hollywood work so well and so profitably
was you made a piece of content and then you
monetize it across what we would call a matrix, right,
multiple geographies and multiple platforms. That hasn't been fixed with
(04:50):
the launch of streaming. Yes, their content is being monetized globally.
But the multiple platform thing where you put on television,
you put in the theaters, you sold it to multiple
media companies, that still hasn't been fixed, and so that's
still a problem in terms of being profitable. In addition,
when you look at especially like the large US media companies,
(05:11):
while they're growing their profitability on the streaming side, they're
still dealing with the overall of the kind of linear television.
And you know, linear television at one point, you know,
in some cases had forty eight to fifty percent margins
and those margins are coming down dramatically, and so that
need that trends still leads to clear where linear television
either stabilizes or disappears and streaming profitability takes off. Before
(05:36):
you start to see a reversal and margins start to
really improve for the media companies.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
There's no conversation about global financial markets would be complete
without discussing AI. It still feels like we're in the
stage of boy, there's a lot of promise on the horizon,
but what is actually happening now? Are you seeing anybody
at a few basis points or at a few percentages
to their margin because of AI savings.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Not yet. In our conversations with the companies the studios,
they've talked about the potential to get significant savings both
on the pre production side as well as on the
post production side. Whether that translates to the studios having
greater return on their production, I don't know. Those savings
(06:21):
might get rolled up and put back into more productions.
So for the money that's saved on a particular movie,
you might get put back into additional films, so you
might get an increase in the number of films or
TV shows being made, or it may go go to
paying for talent. So it isn't clear to me yet
that these savings are going to show up in the
(06:42):
bottom line, but the companies are talking about it, and
at some point in the next couple of years you'll
start to see that impact and it'll probably start to
quantify how much savings this means on the bottom line
for their content creation.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Another key point you make is about just in general,
the much increased focus on profitability for streamers, and you,
like many others, very flatly note that Netflix has quote
an insurmountable lead compared to its in industry rivals end quote,
three hundred million global subscribers operating margins of just over
(07:16):
thirty percent. Do you see anybody else getting near that
in five years?
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Not from the legacy media companies. So Disney clearly has
taken on the strategy. They aren't necessarily trying to be Netflix,
but they certainly have the global scale and the content
to be able to, you know, be a strong number
two or number three. But you certainly have Amazon who
could do that, Apple could do that. The other guys,
(07:44):
the legacy media companies don't have the global scale right,
and frankly they're not really pursuing it, whether it's Peacock
that has saying primarily in the US and will do
joint ventures overseas or Paramount which is in a many
of the English language countries but hasn't really gone beyond that.
And so that limitation itself, the fact that they're not
(08:04):
three hundred million subscribers in two hundred territories limits their
ability to get economies of scale, and so you might
see this is where mergers make sense, where you can
get scaled domestically but also overseas, where they might be
able to try to get to the same profitability levels
as a Disney or a Netflix down the road.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Do you see Disney Plus as having a lot of
runway internationally?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Yes, Disney has an incredibly strong brand, and I know
that they're not planning on going to every market, but
they certainly could offered their services, whether it's through a
joint venture or through them launching their own streaming service
in a particular country globally, So yeah, they could in
theory get to that kind of scale.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Let's move to advertising. You say advertising remains solid after
a shaky start to the year. Now, it's a pretty
grim forecast for linear TV. National TV U forecast to
be down about seven point four percent for the year.
That's not a surprise coming off a political year as
well as the Olympics last August. Local TV is a
(09:08):
little bit better, but also with three percent decline. Digital,
of course, no surprise is your forecasting nine point five
percent growth for the year, and for streaming specifically, the
number is twenty percent to zero, up five point five
percent from your previous forecast. Now, Vin, what's going on here?
Speaker 2 (09:27):
If you go back to the beginning of the year
and the threat of tariffs, advertisers were concerned that tariffs
would have a huge impact on the economy, consumers would
cut back on spending, and so there was a pause
in March in to April where advertisers basically said, let's
like a pause on this and see where the economy
is going. And they came back pretty quickly. The one
(09:51):
thing about advertising today, especially on digital platforms, is it
can get placed very very quickly, and so the old
days where it took months to place, and so it
was a trailer indicator of economic activity, that's kind of ended,
and so advertisers can turn on and off Di Spiggot
relatively quickly, and so they did, and it stayed relatively
healthy the rest of the year. In general, the economy
is doing relatively well, especially when you consider how it's
(10:13):
comparing to the rest of the world. And advertisers have
learned over the years. If you look at the pandemic, if
you don't advertise, you lose market share when the economy
returns and people start spending. So advertisers have continued to
spend and it's benefited connected TV and clearly linear television
will continue to lose advertising. But if you're a media
(10:35):
company and you sell linear television and connected TV advertising
together and aggregate. That's growth, right, So it's a share shift,
but the media companies are benefiting from that because they're
getting the streaming advertising as well.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
It's an attention economy and the dollars follow the eyeballs.
Your last item is of course about M and A,
which is also something that has consumed a lot of
people at Variety following the bouncing ball of the Paramount
Skydance transaction, and now just as the dust settle there,
stirred it up about Paramount possibly going after Warner Brothers Discovery,
possibly others jumping in bring barring in a different transaction.
(11:12):
Warner Brothers Discovery is on track to separate CNN and
TNT and a bunch of they're well established declining leading
or cable channels off into a separate company. NBC Universal
is also well along on such a spin off that
they're gonna call Versant Media Group. In the harsh light
of seeing companies that are divesting, you know, big media
(11:33):
companies are divesting these assets, I have to ask the
skeptical question, what is going to be the reception to
these Are they going to be seen as a well
built but listing ocean liner.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
That's a good question. I'm not an equity analyst, so
I can't talk about how the equity is going to perform.
But from a credit standpoint, the question we're getting asked
by investors is how long are these businesses going to last?
Is it ten years? Is five years? Is it twelve years?
You know, to make a comparison, It's kind of like
yellow pages and newspapers, right, it's a decline? Can they
(12:05):
manage that decline? And that decline in the cash flow?
What creditors want to know is can they get repaid?
You're not going to see these companies go out and
do ten year or fifteen year bonds because who knows
what the world is going to work like in ten
or fifteen years. They're going to be shorter duration and
probably more focused on bank debt, which will amortize and
they can pay that off quickly. Right, they can pay
(12:26):
it off as a generating cash flow. So as long
as they're generating cash flow as you can connaite to
finance these businesses. But as Ebadatic lines, the amount of
debt that public shareholders, private bondholders, private debt holders are
willing to put into this company will continue to shrike,
and the question is how long will will that go on?
You know, Yellow Pages companies are still around, and our
(12:49):
newspaper companies are still around, and so it doesn't just
dive off a cliff. It takes time, and so the
question is how long is that going to take?
Speaker 1 (12:57):
At some point it just becomes math. Let me button
up by asking you, I mean, how is what's going
on in the credit marketplace and with interest rates? How
is that impacting the level of M and A going
on in media and telecom? Do you think would there
be more activity if things felt a little more stable.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Interest rates are interesting because interesting treasury rates are high
today versus where they were five years ago. So the
spread between the treasuries and where corporate debt trades are
at historic lows. The challenge for a lot of these
companies and the big investment grade companies have less need
(13:35):
for financing unless they're doing M and A, and so
you know they benefit from that. But if you look
at a lot of the smaller companies who are going
through refinancings, there's a lot of questions about long term
viability of some of these sectors, especially legacy media, and
so the interest rates that they have to pay to
refinanced debt is staggering. It's nine percent, it's ten percent.
(13:57):
My parents would say that, you know, these are rates
that they saw back in the sey.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Right, and that right on its face, is just prohibitive.
You can't do it right. Noven, thank you so much.
You're in the thick of media earning season. I really
appreciate you taking this time out to talk with us.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
You're very welcome.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
As we close out today's episode, here's a few things
we're watching for. Here comes Stranger Things. The season five
trailer is out and it looks spooky good. The first
four episodes drop on Netflix on November twenty six, but
you already know that because you read about it earlier
this month in Variety's cover story with the Duffer Brothers.
Here comes the American Film Market. The annual Film Market
(14:40):
is back to Los Angeles after shifting to Las Vegas
last year. Nobody liked the vibe in Sin City, so
they're posting up at the Century Plaza Hotel this time around. Somehow,
I feel like the AFM is just going to continue
to keep moving west, and in a few years it'll
probably be back in Santa Monica, where it was held
for decades. Starting tomorrow, we'll produce the first of two
(15:01):
digital dailies out of the h Lava Documentary Film Festival
in the Czech Republic, and next week we'll be in
Taiwan covering the Taiwan Creative Content Fest. You can find
all of that coverage on Variety dot com under the
Global tab. Before we go, Happy birthday greetings going out
to Variety's Michelle Sabrino Stearns. We can't wait to see
(15:21):
what the coming year brings for our fearless leader as
she segues into a new chapter of her career. Rock
on MSS. Thanks for listening. This episode was written and
reported by me Cynthia Littleton Stick Snack's hick Picks. Please
leave us a review at the podcast platform of your choice,
and please tune in Monday for another episode of Daily
Variety and once again for all the marbles, Go Dodgers.
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