Faced with the prospect of having to punch up bland interviews with Paramount Global Chair Shari Redstone and CEO Bob Bakish, new New York Times media writer Benjamin Mullin turned to a reliably bombastic source, celebrity media analyst Richard Greenfield.

And the LightShed Partners company principal delivered, predicting that Paramount will have to merge or sell itself in the next five years in order to survive the media business' currently Darwinian playing field. 

“I don’t think there’s anybody who believes that in five years, this company won’t either have bought other things or become part of something larger,” Greenfield told the Times. “It’s eat or be eaten time.”

Paramount finished March with 62 million subscription streaming subscribers across its Paramount Plus and Showtime brands, but the conglomerate still isn't making money on SVOD, Greenfield noted. 

The Times' Memorial Day Weekend story fit nicely with the triumphant debut of Paramount theatrical title Top Gun: Maverick, which debuted to a powerful $124 million at the domestic box office, the biggest opener of star Tom Cruise's career

As the Times noted, Redstone and top-level Paramount Global management met with bankers in January to discuss possible merger targets. 

A potential tie-up was discussed for Comcast, with which Paramount already partners with in Europe. 

In the end, Redstone and Bakish decided to go it alone. 

“In many respects we continue to be the underdog, and that’s OK,” Bakish said. “But I think as time goes on, people will continue to increasingly see that Paramount is powerful.” ■

UPDATED 11/2/21: This story was updated to include correct monthly revenue per active user and monthly loss per active user figures. 

Peacock is losing over $8 a month on each monthly active user. And while it's on target to meet or surpass its goal of 30 million to 35 million users by 2024, the year parent Comcast/NBCUniversal told investors that the platform would break even, 84% of the current users who take a paid "premium" iteration of Peacock still get it free with their Comcast or Cox cable subscription.

Average monthly revenue per active user is nowhere near the $7 - $8 of NBCU's break-even 2024 projection.

This bleak revenue perspective was provided by LightShed Partners Richard Greenfield, who in a note to investors urged parent company Comcast to make much bigger investments in Peacock, or get out of the video business altogether. 

Last week, Comcast and its NBCUniversal division announced that Peacock's third-quarter operating losses had more than doubled to $520 million on revenue of $230 million. 

NBCU CEO Jeff Shell was opaque about how many active users Peacock added in Q3 across its free/entirely ad-supported, $4.99-a-month and $9.99/entirely ad-free tiers, beyond the 20 million "monthly active accounts" (MAAs) reported in the second quarter. 

"We added a few more ..." Shell said.

"Assuming average MAAs of 21.5 million in Q3 2021," Greenfield noted, puts Peacock at an average revenue per user (ARPU) of only around $3.56 over July, August and September. Comcast and NBCU are well behind 2024/break-even projections of $6 to $7 in average revenue per customer made in January 2020, six months before the national launch of Peacock, the analyst also said. 

Also: NBCU Pushes More Sports Onto USA Network and Peacock

Beyond the fact that most of the Peacock Premium and Premium Plus users get the SVOD service at no extra charge along with their cable subscription, the fact that a third of MAAs choose the free tier means that a large portion of the audience misses out on Peacock's premium content, which is perhaps the most sticky. 

This further exacerbates a problem: Peacock engagement isn't great, Greenfield said, hurting ad revenue. 

"This leads to the Peacock financial conundrum. Peacock spent $750 million this past quarter to only generate $230 million of revenue," Greenfield wrote. "If the key problem is not having enough paying subs (beyond Comcast/Cox subs who get it for free) and engagement to drive advertising ARPU, the clear answer becomes Peacock needs far more content than it is currently offering."

The break-even point is probably a lot higher than 35 million subscribers generating $7 a month in ARPU, Greenfield added. "Investors should be prepared for far greater Peacock investment spending over the next few years if Peacock wants to be a 'top four, must-have' streaming service," as a recent NBCU internal document, obtained by Business Insider, suggested.

This includes PVOD.  

"To be clear, Peacock CAN be successful as a hybrid advertising/subscription service," Greenfield said. "However, NBC Universal needs to put dramatically higher investment spending into Peacock. Halloween Kills and Boss Baby showed how day-and-date movies on Peacock drive subs (akin to HBO Max’s success this year). While Universal is reverting back to theatrical windows, albeit shorter windows, going forward for most films, we believe Peacock would be far more successful if every film was day-and-date."

At a time when investors covet Comcast's broadband and overall connectivity business more than anything, Greenfield has other advice for the conglomerate: As in, get out of the video business. And he doesn't mean just bundled multichannel video. He thinks Comcast should divest NBCU much in the way that AT&T is spinning of WarnerMedia. 

"Comcast needs to focus on maintaining its broadband prowess (wired and wireless) and trying to become the broadband-powered tvOS platform in the home, while NBC Universal needs to increase content/IP scale to compete as consumer behavior shifts away from linear TV," Greenfield wrote.

LightShed Media Partners analyst Richard Greenfield has described a decidedly bleak prospect for Sinclair Broadcast Group successfully transitioning its debt-ridden Bally Sports-branded regional sports networks into a direct-to-consumer streaming service. 

It‘s “#GameOver” for that gambit, Greenfield said in a posting this morning. 

Also read: Sinclair Streaming RSN Plan Slammed by MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred

“Sinclair has tried to convince investors that it can avoid a Diamond Sports bankruptcy by transforming its 14 RSNs from being locked into the legacy MVPD/vMVPDs bundles to a direct-to-consumer, over-the-top streaming service … and that there is a robust sports betting opportunity for the Diamond Sports RSNs to take advantage of,” Greenfield wrote.

The analyst may have gotten the number of Bally Sports RSNs operated by Sinclair's Diamond Sports Group wrong — it‘s actually 21. 

But Greenfield appears spot on when he said that the whole pitch appears based on a “fabrication:” That is, all 14 Major League Baseball teams that have linear TV licensing deals with Bally Sports RSNs are willing to also license their DTC/streaming rights to Diamond Sports.

Last week, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred damned the plan —  and perhaps, Diamond Sports into eventual bankruptcy — when he said simply that Sinclair doesn‘t “have the rights” it needs to pull off an ambitious DTC plan revealed to investors over the spring. 

Extrapolating further, Greenfield described MLB as being philosophically similar to the NBA in terms of how it manages digital rights. The MLB did decide in 2019 to let its teams negotiate their digital rights themselves. To date, however, only four of the 14 MLB teams that Sinclair partners with have offered up their OTT rights: the Miami Marlins, the Tampa Bay Rays, the Kansas City Royals and the Milwaukee Brewers. 

Also read: Why Sinclair‘s $250 Million Sports Streaming Swing Could Deliver a Walk-off Defeat of Pay TV

Ultimately, Greenfield believes, MLB and NBA teams will work with their respective league and a third-party technology vendor to make their own DTC services, re-negotiating with pay TV operators to preserve whatever revenue is left from the linear ecosystem.

And Sinclair very likely won't be a part of those forward-looking enterprises, he said. 

”Sinclair has no expertise in digital or streaming, has never built a direct-to-consumer subscription business and only covers a portion of the U.S.,” Greenfield added. “Sinclair is actually one of the worst possible choices for the leagues to partner with in digital.”

Classifying Sinclair as an absolute digital beginner is too harsh. 

Not only does the broadcaster‘s portfolio include 185 local broadcast stations, but several digital over-the-air channels, hybrid AVOD/local programming streaming service STIRR, a major investment in ATSC 3.0 tech and the shared local-news service NewsON, plus a better integrated ad-selling infrastructure.

But again, Greenfield's larger point — that Sinclair and Diamond have a tough ninth-inning rally in front of them — holds up. 

Sinclair bought the Fox Sports RSNs from Disney, as well as the Marquee Network and YES Network, in August 2019 for $9.6 billion, putting them under the control of a separate company it owns, Diamond Sports, and selling the naming rights to the channels. 

Much as they did in 2015, when AT&T paid $49 billion for DirecTV, analysts questioned what the heck Sinclair management was thinking paying a such a huge sum of money amid declines for the multichannel video programming distributor business. 

Sinclair was left trying to pay off nearly $10 billion in debt with an RSN business that has annually escalating costs in the form of team contracts, but declining EBITDA from pay TV customers continuing to exit the ecosystem. 

“After Sinclair purchased the Fox RSNs from Disney, we wrote that we expected the newly renamed Diamond Sports RSN group’s EBITDA of $1.6 billion to turn negative by 2025,” Greenfield noted. 

So the North American theatrical exhibition business just had its biggest revenue weekend in 19 months.

Yet, celebrity equity analyst Richard Greenfield is warning investors to run--don't walk--from AMC, Cineworld, Cinemark and every other company vested in the theatrical exhibition of motion pictures. 

"The theater chains are in deep trouble. I mean, deep, deep trouble," the LightShed Partners principal told Yahoo Finance. 

How deep? Pretty deep. 

Over the weekend, Disney Marvel film Black Widow grossed $80 million at the U.S. and Canadian box office, and another $78 million at the foreign box office. It was the biggest theatrical performance for a major U.S. studio title since Disney's last "Star Wars" theatrical feature was released in the pre-pandemic month of December 2019. 

Still, the concurrent release of Black Widow as a $30 premium "Premiere Access" title on Disney Plus represents a "watershed moment" for the movie business, Greenfield said, one in which the studios have seized substantial leverage from the theater chains. 

"If you think about it, this movie did 158 million globally and 60 million directly at home," he added. "Disney keeps 80% of the 60 million. Of the 158, they probably keep, you know, maybe 60%, and that number goes down over as the film plays longer and longer. So this is a big signal that direct-to-home movies that, you know, don't have to be seen in theaters are here to stay."

Movie theaters won't necessarily go away, Greenfield contended, "but the leverage in the relationship is shifting towards the movie studio. They're realizing they can generate a lot of money directly to consumer. They actually get to have a direct relationship with the consumer. They know who you are, and you don't have to go to a movie theater. This is a pretty profound moment."

Greenfield's thesis--that the outsized Premiere Access Black Widow performance is bad omen for theatrical distribution--can be assailed.

It was the biggest day-and-date movie streaming performance so far--at least that we know about, because this is the first time a studio has released such a numb er. But it occurred with COVID-19's delta variant influencing renewed concerns among many about the wisdom of convening together in indoor environments. Los Angeles County, for example, has suggested that vaccinated people once again wear masks indoors, for example. 

And how many of the 2 million or so Disney Plus-subscribing households worldwide, which paid $30 to watch Black Widow, were from a portion of the market that doesn't regularly go to movie theaters, anyway? In other words, did Disney tap into an accretive portion of the market, rather than eat into theatrical distribution?

For his part, Greenfield's, er, reticence toward theater chains might have something to do with the recently outsized Wall Street performance of AMC Holdings, which like Game Stop several months earlier, seems to have been birthed out of a Reddit-fueled, artificial insemination. 

"AMC was not making money pre-pandemic," Greenfield said. "I mean, that's the most important thing-- they weren't making money pre-pandemic."

Sony is making the smart play by not launching a “Sony Plus.”

That’s the contention of LightShed Partners analyst Richard Greenfield, following the studio’s announcement of a new output deal with Disney. The agreement delivers to Disney Plus rights to Marvel Spider-Man films and other Sony movies, after they complete their “Pay 1” window through a separate agreement announced several weeks ago with Netflix. 

The pact, which runs from 2022-2026, gives Disney Plus rights to the Marvel titles it doesn’t already own (aka Spider-Man), about nine months after their theatrical run. It’s the window that was previously confined to ad-supported cable and broadcast TV.

The deal is reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars of its entire span.

Also Read: Netflix Ups the Ante with Latest Deals 

“Every studio exec should be questioning whether competing in SVOD ‘really’ makes sense vs. being an arms dealer,” Greenfield tweeted Wednesday, applauding Sony’s deal. 

Indeed, Sony once had grand plans about building an OTT ecosystem based on its PlayStation console business. But before it even ditched its quest to be a virtual pay TV provider (RIP PlayStation Vue), it ran away from the SVOD biz, too, selling Crackle to Chicken Soup for the Soul in 2019. 

In earlier remarks made at a Variety event on Monday, Greenfield elaborated on the competitive nature of the SVOD business. Most media conglomerates don’t have the scale—or the will and commitment—to succeed in it right now, he said. 

Also Read: Comcast Launches Disney Plus and ESPN Plus on X1 and Flex

“Everything Disney is doing illustrates that the one thing they have learned in the first 12 months of Disney Plus is that the resources to be successful are far, far beyond what they initially anticipated,” Greenfield said. “Everyone is going to have to learn this."

“The way to win in the streaming wars is to be incredibly focused, put the consumer first and stop worrying about your legacy business, stop worrying about breaking windows,” he added. 

Of course, Greenfield’s advice doesn’t necessarily pertain to Sony, which has found a way to profit from keeping windows intact. 

“This groundbreaking agreement reconfirms the unique and enduring value of our movies to film lovers and the platforms and networks that serve them,” said Keith Le Goy, president of worldwide distribution and networks for Sony Pictures Entertainment. “We are thrilled to team up with Disney on delivering our titles to their viewers and subscribers. This agreement cements a key piece of our film distribution strategy, which is to maximize the value of each of our films, by making them available to consumers across all windows with a wide range of key partners.”

Comcast and Disney shouldn’t wait until 2024 to move the former’s 33% stake in Hulu to the latter, LightShed Partners analyst Richard Greenfield said.

“The Hulu joint venture appears to have outlived its usefulness, with Comcast and Disney both increasingly focused on their own direct-to-consumer platforms,” Greenfield said In a blog post for investors Wednesday.

Disney consolidated most of Hulu’s joint-venture ownership in 2019, when it closed on its $71.3 billion purchase of Fox’s entertainment assets. At the time, it entered into an agreement with Comcast to assume operational control of Hulu. The deal also stipulated that as early as 2024, Disney could purchase Comcast’s 33% stake in Hulu for market value, with the floor price set at $27.5 billion. 

As Greenfield noted, Disney is limiting the value growth of Hulu through international expansion, growing the service in foreign markets through its Hotstar brand. But the investor excitement around connected TV advertising is exploding. Hulu could be worth as much as $45 billion right now, according to LightShed’s modeling, meaning Comcast's share could be valued by as much as $15 billion. 

“Waiting until 2024 to resolve ownership would appear to create an unwanted/unnecessary financial overhang on Disney given how fast the valuation of streaming assets are growing,” the analyst noted.

Indeed, Hulu's valuation could very well rise much higher in three years, Greenfield surmises, since the JV arrangement “appears to complicate both companies’ strategic plans—slowing Disney’s ability to unify its streaming services and preventing Comcast from having exclusive access to its current programming and library content.”

Perhaps there’s no better example of Greenfield’s claim than the strange dual-platform arrangement announced earlier this week for Modern Family, which will stream on both Peacock and Hulu starting next month. 

Virtual MVPDs continue to grow, now accounting for 15% of total U.S. pay TV subscriptions. But analysts also continue to be bearish on the business of souped traditional channel bundles for the streaming age.

Case in point: LightShed Partners analyst Richard Greenfield told investors in a note today that the vMVPD model remains “broken.” 

“As it turns out, vMVPD’s really did not offer much of a fresh start for the multichannel video industry,” Greenfield wrote. 

Rather than rebuild the channel bundle from the ground up, separating out networks nobody watches from essentials like major broadcast networks and ESPN, vMVPD bundles have been influenced by the same economic gravity as their traditional forebears. 

Greenfield specifically noted today’s ViacomCBS announcement that it has infiltrated 14 additional cable networks onto No. 1 vMVPD Hulu Plus Live TV. This latest carriage deal, the analyst said, demonstrates the “strategic merit” of the 2019 merger of Viacom and CBS Corp., which hitched the Viacom cable networks many of the vMVPDs were beginning to realize they could live without to more essential CBS assets, such as the CBS Broadcast Network. 

Also read: FuboTV’s Wild Holiday Bender: Stock Comes Crashing Back to Earth After Spiking 61%

ViacomCBS had already used this newfound leverage to position the same networks on No. 2 vMVPD, YouTube TV.

Further consolidation has also affected Fox-owned networks, now owned by Disney, as well as Scripps, which was acquired by Discovery.

“The power of bundling broadcast and cable networks is strikingly obvious, as it always has been,” Greenfield wrote. “vMVPDs have realized they cannot grow meaningfully and reduce churn without a wide array of content, aka 'the bundle' or certain key networks, which unfortunately come with other networks that the distributors may not want.”

The problems go deeper, he adds.

Just as vMVPDs are being forced to bloat their bundles—and their price points—to traditionally fat levels, programmers are diluting their linear channels, prioritizing new SVOD platforms like Disney Plus over traditional cable networks like Disney Channel, for instance. 

Meanwhile, the popular vMVPD may chest-thump about being destinations for sports programming, but that's disingenuous, Greenfield contended, with most vMVPD platforms missing at least one major sports network component. 

All of this, Greenfield added, helps "explain why Sony Vue was shuttered, why Sling has slowed its growth dramatically, why AT&T TV Now has lost more than half its subscribers from its peak and why Fubo is dramatically overvalued at current levels."

As for Hulu Plus Live TV and YouTube TV, which jointly now control 10% of U.S. pay TV subscriptions, the analyst believes their respective parent companies have ulterior motives for investing in what he believes are low-margin businesses. 

Disney, which now fully controls joint venture Hulu, is able to prop up distribution of ESPN through Hulu, which is still important to the conglomerate’s bottom line.

Google, meanwhile, is able to grow the subscriber portion of the YouTube business through YouTube TV. 

After surging to $62 a share on Dec. 22, the most volatile stock in the video business has come crashing down, with fuboTV trading at just under $24 as of midday on the Nasdaq.

The swift decline comes after LightShed Partners analyst Richard Greenfield threw cold water on the fuboTV, which IPO’d in October. 

“There is no special sauce [for] Fubo, which can turn the fundamentally flawed MVDP/vMVPD business into a good one, especially if it lacks scale and other products to bundle,” Greenfield wrote in a note to investors on Dec. 27.

Read more: FuboTV, Amid Wild Ride, Says 4Q Subs Rose 72%

BMO Capital Markets also issued a downgrade for the stock last week.

FuboTV, however, does have plenty of bulls in its corner, too. Notably, Needham analyst Laura Martin re-affirmed her “buy” rating for the stock last week at a $60 price target. 

On Tuesday (Jan. 5), the stock bounced back in early trading (up about $5, or 20%, to above $29) after saying it expected to report revenue and subscriber gains in the fourth quarter.

Supporters believe the virtual pay TV service, which has focused on licensing national, international and regional sports networks, has the ability to carve out a unique niche, integrating features like sports betting down the road. 

In addition to its core vMVPD, fuboTV also operators the Fubo Sports Network, a 24/7 live programming channel distributed through myriad OTT platforms. 

FuboTV has some notable backers: Last week, for instance, hedge fund Islet Management disclosed that it controls a 7% stake in fuboTV. Also, media companies including Disney, Discovery, AMC Networks and others have acquired stakes in the company tied to their content licensing deals. 

Also worth mentioning: Veteran media executive Edgar Bronfman Jr. recently became the company’s executive chairman.

FuboTV’s revenue rose 47% in Q3 to $61.2 million, with subscribers growing 58%. 

But with the company reporting a net loss of $274.1 million, fuboTV has a long way to go before it can be correctly valued at or above some of the companies it momentarily usurped on Wall Street, reasoned Greenfield, who initiated coverage of the stock on Dec. 23 with a sell rating and target price of $8 a share. 

“The company has told a story which has been embraced by an army of retail investors. However, Fubo is not Netflix, Fubo is not Flutter/FanDuel, DraftKings nor even Penn/Barstool Sports, Fubo is not Roku and Fubo is not Trade Desk. Fubo is simply just another virtual multichannel video programming distributor (vMVPD) facing the same obstacles and financial challenges as every other vMVPD,” Greenfield said.

Outspoken analyst Rich Greenfield of Lightshed Partners is urging investors to sell fuboTV, calling the company a "money-losing virtual MVPD."

In a blog posted Sunday, Greenfield noted that the vMVPD business has proved a difficult one, with little to no profitability regardless of scale, largely undifferentiated product offering and no leverage versus content owners.

“There is no special sauce [for] Fubo, which can turn the fundamentally flawed MVDP/vMVPD business into a good one, especially if it lacks scale and other products to bundle,” Greenfield said. 

“The company has told a story which has been embraced by an army of retail investors. However, Fubo is not Netflix, Fubo is not Flutter/FanDuel, DraftKings nor even Penn/Barstool Sports, Fubo is not Roku and Fubo is not Trade Desk. Fubo is simply just another virtual multichannel video programming distributor (vMVPD) facing the same obstacles and financial challenges as every other vMVPD,” he said.

FuboTV said it had no comment on Greenfield's report.

Read Also: FuboTV Steps Into Betting By Acquiring Balto Sports

Greenfield noted that fuboTV share have run up since October, but he said institutional investors are uninterested in the stock. 

He added that many media companies have taken stock in fuboTV as part of their carriage agreements with fuboTV and that those media companies are "highly likely" to start selling shortly after the expiration of the coming lock up on Dec. 30, 2020. 

FuboTV reported a third quarter net loss of $274.1 million, or $6.20 a share, in November, compared to a $7.166 million loss, or 29 cents a share, a year ago. The losses include a $236.7 million non-cash impairment charge for the legacy FaceBank business. FaceBank acquired fuboTV in March.

Revenue rose 47% to $61.2 million in the third quarter as subscribers grew 58%.

Greenfield had initiated coverage of fuboTV on Dec. 23 with a sell rating and a target price of $8. 

The shares traded Monday morning at $44.18, up 11% on the New York Stock Exchange. FuboTV shares closed Monday down 11.86% at $38.94.

AT&T’s next CEO, John Stankey, released a media-technology bombshell earlier this week, when he announced that his company’s new subscription streaming service, HBO Max, would likely launch May 27 without app support for the world’s top OTT device ecosystem, Amazon Fire TV. 

“I’m pleased to say we’re going to be in virtually all app stores [with] maybe one exception. It looks like we may not be in the Amazon Fire app store when all of this is said and done,” Stankey said.

LightShed Partners analyst Richard Greenfield said in a blog post targeted to investors Thursday that the impasse between AT&T and Amazon likely centers around the way HBO Max will be distributed within Amazon’s Prime Channels, the tech giant’s pioneering aggregated marketplace for SVOD services. 

Also Read: AT&T’s Stankey: HBO Max Probably Won't Launch with Amazon Fire TV Support

Notably, AT&T’s legacy SVOD service, HBO Now, has been a lynchpin for Prime Channels since  the aggregated platform launched in 2015. 

“We believe it all comes down to the legacy HBO Now service, which will continue to exist for some period of time,” Greenfield wrote.

Also Read: HBO Max: Everything You Need to Know

The decision by the erstwhile Time Warner Inc. to allow Amazon to “dis-aggregate” HBO Now into Prime Channels, resell the programming and handle all portions of the customer relationship, spurred the growth of a “channels” movement, Greenfield contends. 

“HBO was quickly joined by Showtime, Starz, CBS All-Access and an array of smaller legacy media owned streaming apps who all embraced channels stores. As Amazon became the primary driver of SVOD subscribers for its channel partners (taking a meaningful share of the subscription economics), Roku Channels and Apple TV+ Channels followed with similar strategies,” the analyst said.

According to a report published in late 2018 by BMO analysts Daniel Salmon and William Lowden (detailed here by Variety), Amazon takes as much as 70% off the top of subscription revenue from its Prime Channels SVOD partners, who in turn, access as many as 45% of their subscribers through Prime Channels. The analysts estimated at the time that Amazon was taking in annual revenue of around $1.7 billion through Channels. 

Netflix and Hulu, however, never allowed their content to be disaggregated into third-party “channels” apps, Greenfield noted. And notably, neither did Amazon Prime Video. 

Why go to the trouble and expense of building a direct-to-consumer platform, only to cede the customer relationship—and a big portion of the profits—to a third party like Amazon or Apple, which in turn, is directly competing with you in the SVOD arena? Greenfield and LightShed wondered in a previous investor missive published last year.

The Walt Disney Company probably was thinking the same thing when it too reported a late-inning impasse with Amazon in the run-up to the successful launch of Disney Plus last November.

Also read: Disney Plus Still Lacks an Amazon Fire TV App a Week Away from Launch

Ultimately, Disney managed to gain Amazon Fire TV app support, but it refused, like Netflix and Hulu, to let Amazon process and resell Disney Plus through Prime Channels. (But as Greenfield noted, it does allow Apple+ TV Channels to include Disney Plus programming in its app. But once users select Disney Plus programming, they’re booted out of the Apple TV app and sent to Disney Plus.)

As Greenfield sees it, AT&T and Amazon are probably arguing about similar things, with the dynamics complicated by the legacy HBO Now streaming service. 

“A new subscriber to HBO Max or an existing HBO Now subscriber who is automatically upgraded to HBO Max at launch, via the Amazon Prime channel store would only be able to watch legacy HBO content via the Prime Channel platform and would need to download the HBO Max app separately to watch content that is exclusive to HBO Max (catalog such as Friends and The Big Bang Theory to original series and movies). We believe Amazon looks at that consumer experience as subpar and overly complicated. We agree.”

AT&T and its WarnerMedia division have already announced HBO Max distribution deals with Hulu, Charter Communications and Google, the latter of which controls the increasingly critical Android TV OTT device ecosystem, as well as virtual pay TV service YouTube TV.

For its part, Amazon Fire TV is the world’s most proliferate OTT device ecosystem, announcing the surpassing of 40 million active users globally back in January. 

In the U.S., Fire TV ranks second to Roku, which also has around 40 million active users. 

While Stankey said most OTT platforms are locked up outside Amazon Fire TV, it’s notable that the conglomerate hasn’t specifically touted a partnership with Roku yet. 

In fact, after Stankey's comments, Roku issued this statement: "As the No. 1 streaming platform in the U.S. with over 40 million active accounts that rely upon Roku to access their favorite programs and to discover new content, we are focused on entering into win-win distribution agreements with all new OTT services as part of their launch strategies. While we don't typically comment on specific deal terms or negotiations, the fact is that in this instance while we believe that HBOMax would benefit greatly from distribution on Roku at launch, we do not currently have an agreement in place."

Stay tuned. A lot will happen before HBO Max launches on May 27.

No, Richard Greenfield is not headed to Disney to become a special assistant to Bob Iger.

But the high-profile technology-media-telecom (TMT) analyst is leaving equity research company BTIG Research, along with fellow analysts Walter Piecyk and Brandon Ross to form a new, unnamed TMT venture.

The news was announced earlier this afternoon by BTIG, which said it will partner with the new company.

“We are excited to work with Rich, Walt and Brandon as their business takes shape in the coming weeks. Their team will produce innovative independent investment research and create a new media company that is expected to fully assess the disruptive forces across the technology, media and telecommunications industries,” said Steven Starker, co-founder of BTIG.

According to the announcement, the new company will "offer inventive ways of accessing intriguing TMT portfolio companies, both public and private, and will offer thematic research.”

BTIG said it plans to collaborate with the new firm on a variety of important strategic initiatives.

“This new venture will enable Rich, Walt and Brandon to be even more entrepreneurial, an attribute which has driven the success of BTIG since inception,” said Scott Kovalik, co-founder and CEO of BTIG. “Rich, Walt and Brandon have always pushed to provide unique and thematic views; while we will miss having them on our platform, we are happy to be aligning with their new efforts.”

On LinkedIn, connections to Greenfield were messaged that they should congratulate him on his new position, “TBD,” at “TBD.”

“We are looking forward to this next chapter and appreciate the support we have received from the BTIG leadership team and our BTIG family,” Greenfield said. “We are proud to have initiated TMT coverage at the firm nearly a decade ago, and we continue to believe in the quality of its research, products and the value it delivers to clients.”

Greenfield has achieved somewhat of a celebrity presence among TMT analysts, notably sparring at times with Disney, a company he has covered for years.

In 2016, he was the subject of a Michael Wolff takedown in The Hollywood Reporter headlined, “Michael Wolff on Digital Media's Favorite Analyst: Often Quoted ... and Often Wrong.”

While severe fourth-quarter losses for DirecTV Now may have led some to believe that the once fast-growing virtual pay TV sector was in its fifteenth minute of fame, these services now control an ever-larger marketshare of U.S. pay TV homes.

According to BTIG Research, there were around 7.7 million subscribers to Sling TV, DirecTV Now, Hulu+ Live TV, Sony PlayStation Vue, YouTube TV, fuboTV and other live-streamed pay TV bundles at the end of 2018.

With linear pay TV subscriptions declining to 79.6 million at the end of Q4, vMVPDs controlled nearly 10% of the U.S. pay TV market.

At the end of 2017, BTIG estimated that there were around 4.7 million vMVPD subscriptions in the U.S. accounting for only around 5% of the domestic pay TV market.

Certainly, the sector ended 2018 on a downer note, with AT&T’s DirecTV Now reporting the loss of 267,000 users in the fourth quarter—a loss the company said that stemmed from having around 500,000 users end steep promotional discounts last year.

So other than DirecTV Now’s promo hangover, how is the vMPVD market really doing? Since there’s still so little in the way of self-disclosed subscriber data, it’s kind of tough to really say definitely.

The only other vMVPD besides DirecTV Now to publicly report subscriber data is Dish Network’s Sling TV, which said it grew by 208,000 subscribers in 2018. Since Dish didn’t start breaking out Sling TV numbers until the beginning of 2018, we have only the guesses of analysts to suggest that’s a deceleration of growth.

Leichtman Research, for instance, estimated that Sling TV grew by around 700,000 users in 2017.

Related: Sling TV Adds 50K Subscribers in Q4

How about the rest of the sector? From Hulu to YouTube TV to Sony Vue to fuboTV, none of the other major vMPVD services has announced a subscriber count recently.

For its part, BTIG estimates that Hulu+ Live TV had around 1.8 million customers at the end of Q4—a benchmark that would surpass the 1.59 million users DirecTV had when it stumbled into the New Year.

Research company The Diffusion Group also believes Hulu has surpassed DirecTV in subscribers.

(Our question: While Hulu recently boasted the addition of 8 million users across its streaming platforms, it notably did not toot its horn about its vMVPD being in second place. Wouldn’t that be something they’d brag about?)

In any event, outside of DirecTV Now, the widely unprofitable vMPVD sector does appear to be still growing in market share, and dragging down ARPU as it does.

At Dish, for example, pay TV average revenue per user (ARPU) dropped from $86.43 in 2017 to $85.46 last year. In 2016, the operator’s pay TV ARPU was $88.66.

Meanwhile, one analyst estimated last year that YouTube TV was losing around $60 million a year for Google.

Related: Google’s Pichai: YouTube TV is ‘an Exciting Product’

The U.S. vMVPD market is so competitive and low-margin right now, that David Gandler, CEO of fuboTV, predicted that “one or two” competitors could hang it up this year.

However, with operators convinced that the financial fortunes of these platforms will improve dramatically once they get to scale and get supported by advanced advertising, none of them seems close to calling it quits.

For example, Google CEO Sundar Pichai called out YouTube TV as an “exciting product” during the company’s Q4 earnings call earlier this month.

fuboTV—which operates more advantageously under the tough market conditions as a well-funded start-up—just announced a major carriage deal with Viacom.

Meanwhile, PlayStation Vue—which has quietly crept along since the vMVPD category was first created back in 2015—doesn’t appear set to throw in the towel.

With Sony on the cusp of releasing the fifth generation of its PlayStation gaming console, the company appears to be beefing up staff for its vMVPD at its Los Angeles operational headquarters.