Long-time media analyst Marci Ryvicker has been named SVP of Investor Relations at Comcast, replacing Jason Armstrong, who was promoted to Group Chief Financial Officer at the company’s British satellite unit, Sky.

Ryvicker will report to Comcast CFO Michael Cavanagh.

“Marci has tremendous expertise in the media, technology, cable, and broadcast industries, and is one of the most well-known and highly-respected analysts on Wall Street,” Cavanagh said in a press release. “I look forward to her bringing her leadership and talents to our strong investor relations and finance teams, which do a terrific job communicating our company strategy to the analyst and shareholder communities.”

Ryvicker, who will assume her new position in mid-January, was most recently managing director at Wolfe Research. She has previously spent 16 years as the senior equity analyst at Wells Fargo Securities, where during her tenure she was ranked as the top research analyst in its internal client and sales polls between 2012-2018. Ryvicker began her career as a certified public accountant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLC. 

CBS and Dish Network managed to hammer out a retransmission-consent agreement and end a blackout of satellite subscribers, but there was no announcement that the network would be streaming on Sling, Dish’s skinny bundle service.

Neither company would comment, but sources familiar with the situation said CBS resisted being put on Sling TV, just like in 2014, the last time the two companies negotiated a carriage deal.

Related: CBS, Dish Reach Carriage Pact

The objection CBS has with Sling TV is that the streamer doesn’t want the signals of all CBS affiliates. In its streaming deals, including CBS’s own over-the-top, direct-to-consumer service CBS All Access, the network cuts the affiliates in for a piece of the pie.

Not getting CBS on Sling TV is not good for Dish, the first major virtual multichannel video programming distributor. Sling is approaching 2 million subscribers, making it the largest of the vMVPDs, according to a recent report by Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar.

It is important to Dish that Sling TV add subscribers as cord-cutting and cord-shaving reduce the number of traditional pay TV customers.

“Sling's continued growth could give it enough scale in the next couple of years to drive operating leverage,” Venkateshwar said. “We believe the addressable market of cord-cutters could grow to 31 million over the next decade, making this a sizable opportunity if Dish continues to grow Sling. Strategically, this is also likely to add to Dish’s value for counterparties.”

CBS CEO Les Moonves maintains that no skinny bundle can prosper without CBS in its lineup. And other than Sling, CBS has been signed up by most of the other big vMVPDs, including DirecTV Now, YouTube TV and Hulu.

Being on these new platforms is also good for CBS.

"When consumers cut the cord and switch to skinny bundles, the economics get better for us, growing rates as well,” Moonves said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call with analysts earlier this month.

“When a viewer switches from a traditional distributor to a streaming skinny bundle, CBS’s fee doubles, he said. If they subscribe to CBS All Access, CBS’s haul sometime triples. “OTT is a more profitable business model.”

Another analyst, Marci Ryvicker of Wells Fargo, noted that CBS’s agreement with Dish came a day or so after CBS said it was significantly far apart in talks with the satellite carrier.

Related: Analyst Says as Dish Battle Rages, Charter Could Be CBS’ Next Big Retrans Fight

“We have been asked who might have ‘caved’ here – our sense is that it was DISH, esp. during a popular NFL-heavy holiday weekend. Content is still king,” Ryvicker said.

Wells Fargo media analyst Marci Ryvicker has initiated coverage of AMC Networks with a positive “outperform” rating.

“We think AMC possesses every [attribute] that will help it navigate the uncertain media waters successfully,” Ryvicker said in a note Tuesday.

She said the company offers a “clean” programming portfolio, it owns content, its distribution is increasing, it is earning a growing share of the shrinking TV ad pie and it doesn’t have to worry about NFL ratings.

She also said the company has trusted management, and there is the possibility that merger and acquisition activity could boost the stock.

While noting that AMC’s ratings are down on some shows, including The Walking Dead, she notes that there is no other place where advertisers can capture as many adult 18-to-49 eyeballs. AMC’s closest competitors in terms of quality programming are not ad supported, such as HBO, Showtime and Netflix, she adds.

#NYCTVWK: ‘B&C’ Hall of Fame, VR 20/20 Kick Off Fifth Annual Event

In terms of earnings, Ryvicker’s initial estimate is $6.52 per share for 2017, which is above the Wall Street consensus of $6.49.

Ryvicker estimates that based on Discovery Communications's planned acquisition of Scripps Networks Interactive, AMC Should be valued at $76 a share. Her current price target for AMC is $72 a share.

AMC shares were tradiing at $58.26 a share, up 49 cents, in Tueday morning (Oct. 10) trading.

NEW YORK — Broadcast station group stocks, on the rocks over uncertainty around potential deals and deregulation, could be on the rebound, Wells Fargo media analyst Marci Ryvicker said, and the resurgence could spell some bad news for cable operators.

Broadcast stocks had been on a roll late last year, when investors, buoyed by the election of business-friendly President Donald Trump, helped drive shares up 25% to 35% between Nov. 9 and the end of the year. When the benefits of one-party control over the presidency and Congress didn’t come as fast as expected, stock prices suffered.

Since the beginning of the year, shares in publicly traded station groups like Sinclair Broadcast Group, Nexstar Media Group, Tegna and Tribune Media have been relatively flat.

Ryvicker, speaking at the broadcast-centric TVB Forward conference, blamed the sluggishness on disappointment over the lack of movement on the regulatory front and a lack of substantial merger activity.

So far, only Sinclair’s pending $3.9 billion purchase of Tribune has emerged, and it has underwhelmed, she said, partly because of Tribune’s asset mix with several The CW and My Network TV affiliate stations and a small cable network, WGN America. “Wall Street did not like the Tribune stock,” she said. “They didn’t like the assets.”

A finished Sinclair-Tribune deal could help open the M&A floodgates, though, and continued deregulation, especially a relaxing of local ownership rules, should heighten the deal-making, Ryvicker said.

Bigger station groups could give broadcasters more muscle in retrains-mission-consent negotiations with cable operators. Ryvicker said retransmission prospects were not a cause for worry, and relationships between affiliates and their networks are strong.

Broadcast investors also have been spooked by developments outside the industry, particularly declines in pay TV subscribers. Pay TV and broadcast networks are separate industries and have separate issues, but they often trade in tandem, even with radio.

“Investors tend to invest in bundles,” Ryvicker said. “If they are nervous about media as a whole, it’s called a risk-off trade. They start trading everything and anything that is media related.”

Disney sparked jitters two years ago by saying its flagship sports network, ESPN, had shed about 3 million subscribers. That number has risen to between 5 million and 6 million and put pressure on the entire programming sector, not just pay TV networks.

Disney also faced the first test of ESPN’s power on Oct. 1, when its deal with Altice USA systems in the New York area was up for renewal. Altice was expected to reject Disney’s demands for higher rates and broader carriage, and to allow ESPN and Disney’s ABC station in the market to go dark.

Ryvicker sees pay TV erosion continuing, estimating total pay TV subscribers will fall from 97 million in 2016 to 82 million in 2022.

While that could hurt broadcasters, who rely on retransmission-consent revenue from operators to fill their coffers, Ryvicker thinks the slack will be more than taken up by virtual multichannel video programming distributors (vMVPDs) such as Hulu, DirecTV Now and Sling TV, which have begun to include broadcast stations in their offerings. In that same time frame, she estimated, vMVPD subscribers will rise from 1.86 million to 15.9 million.

“Broadcast is in the bundle,” she said, and retransmission-consent revenue will be “totally fine.”

The Walt Disney Co.’s decision to take its powerful content direct to consumers via streaming puts its traditional distributors in an unprecedented place.

Already, traditional pay TV subscriptions are falling. Disney said Tuesday (Aug. 8) during its earnings call that ESPN’s subscriber total was down 3.5% -- a big bite for a network that makes about $7 per month per sub.

“There are many investors who believe that Disney, more than any other company, is responsible for holding what's left of the bundle together,” said analyst Todd Juenger of Sanford C. Bernstein, in a research note.

“Those that hold that view have been waiting for Disney to drop this bombshell, signaling the end of the bundle as we know it," Juenger added. "Did Disney just do that? The answer depends on how much you want to take the (scant) descriptions of these services at face value.”

Related: Losing Disney Movies May Not Hurt Netflix: Analyst

To Marci Ryvicker of Wells Fargo, Disney's announcement led to many unanswerable questions.

"The ESPN service sure sounded to us like management is positioning it (for now, at launch) as an 'add-on' service that would mostly sit on top of the existing ESPN linear networks and deliver extra value and features," Ryvicker said in a note. “How does this impact DIS's upcoming affiliate renewals (CEO Bob Iger did state that he has NOT had conversations with the cable distributors on these services just yet)? How will peers and partners react?”

MCN Flashback, July 27, 2015 > Report: Iger Says ESPN Could Go Direct to Consumer in Five Years

Iger indeed said during the earnings call that Disney had not discussed its plans with its distribution partners. He seemed to think there would not be a backlash.

“As we enter a new round of distribution negotiations, we have all the confidence in the world in our ability to strike deals that are favorable to the company, given the strength of the product that we offer, particularly the strength of the brands,” Iger said.

“If you look very specifically at ESPN, we still see it as a must-have service for the multichannel providers because of the array of product that ESPN has licensed, and what they produce is original programming for the service,” Iger said. “We have seen, as I think that many of you have, a pretty interesting and dramatic increase in -- I'll call it 'app-based media consumption.' Much of it is on over-the-top, direct-to-consumer services.”

How will cable operators react?

“The MVPDs also now face a tough decision," Juenger said. "View this as an upsell partnership? But watch your backs when Disney reaches the inevitable pivot point and decides to go around you.

“Disney makes it sound like they want to position this as a win/win: ‘Upsell your subscribers to new levels of service,’" Juenger continued. "On the other hand, all it will take is a flip of the switch, and Disney can cut the MVPD out of the equation entirely. We can't think of much upside for the MVPDs to be combative with Disney at this stage, at least for the big MVPDs.”

Related > Making the Right Moves: Distributors Strategize in a New Era of Programming

There will be even more pressure on small distributors who are not making money on video and might exit that business to keep making money on high-speed internet.

“But we think the MVPDs will certainly be trying to think of ways to protect themselves against the inevitable future date when Disney goes completely direct,” Juenger said.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

Two prominent media financial analysts, in separate presentations to two different groups, proclaimed their enthusiasm for broadcasting, cable and traditional media while acknowledging the growth of digital media in a revamped "revenue mix." 

Both analysts said they believe the frenzy over digital delivery is slowing.

"Big advertisers are going back to traditional media because they recognize that their digital advertising is not working out," Marci Ryvicker, managing director and senior equity analyst at Wells Fargo Securities, said at a monthly luncheon of the Media Institute on April 3.

Later that day, Laura Martin of Needham & Co. said, "Digital has sullied its brands" by underperforming. In a presentation to the Women in Cable Telecommunications D.C. chapter, Martin cited the extension of traditional TV brands through TV Everywhere and direct-to-consumer services such as CBS All Access as models for "the resurgence of TV."

Both analysts envision a continuing wave of media mergers, although they offered few predictions about specific deals.

"Everybody's a buyer" in the volatile broadcasting sector, Ryvicker said. She acknowledged the regulatory caps on homes reached may affect short-term growth for the largest companies.

She was bullish on Sinclair because "scale is important."

"They've under-promised and over-delivered," Ryvicker said.

On other topics, Ryvicker cited the recent collaboration of Viacom, Time Warner (Turner) and Fox Networks Group  to form "OpenAP," which will help advertisers target specific audiences. She characterized such moves as valuable. 

Ryvicker also predicted  that 2018 political advertising "will go up" thanks to the volatile campaign situation, and she expects that "cable news channels will continue to have big ratings through this administration."

She singled out Disney's performance on several levels and added that she thinks "NBC is trying to do what Disney did" in focusing on specific audience segments for growth.

Ryvicker described the impact of streaming video bundles as creating "a lot of nervousness and guessing" among investors. She expects that only three aggregators will survive on a broad scale, citing Hulu (largely because of its media ownership), Apple (even though it has no product yet) and Amazon.  

In response to a question, she said that she doesn't expect Apple to buy Disney because it doesn't fit with Apple's agenda to "get a device into every home." But she said that it would be "more dangerous if Apple bought Netflix," which is so well established; she did not elaborate.

"We don't have enough data to know what any of this means," Ryvicker confessed.

Martin, senior analyst, Entertainment & Internet, at Needham & Co. and CEO of Capital Knowledge LLC, cited efforts by Google and Facebook to pivot into video delivery companies, but doubted that they have the ability to reach mass video audiences.  

She said that many of the digital providers (not including Netflix) have one or two million customers compared to the 90 million pay TV users nationwide.

"The feel very 'niche-y' to me," Martin said. 

She acknowledged that customers "want rebundling," and pointed to deals such as the one between Showtime and Netflix as a possible harbinger of future alliances.  

Martin also emphasized the value of live viewing -- including sports and other content. She cited the ongoing "revenue mix shift" as advertising and subscriber fees are adapted to the evolving role of digital and mobile video consumption.

Summing up her outlook on cable, Ryvicker drew a knowing laugh from the Media Institute audience when she reminded it to "disengage the company and its stock."

"People hate Comcast but love Comcast stock," Ryvicker said.