VIA - Viacom Inc.

Viacom beats quarterly revenue estimates

Viacom shares are up after the company reported a double beat for Q4. Yahoo Finance’s Brian Cheung, Sibile Marcellus and Heidi Chung break it down on YFi AM.

ViacomCBS plans sale of CBS headquarters in New York

Streaming roundup: Disney driving billion-dollar content race

The streaming landscape is in the midst of an arms race that The Walt Disney Co. is only escalating with the arrival of Disney+.

CBS, Viacom complete merger in a win for Shari Redstone

CBS and Viacom are one again

It's official: Sister mass media conglomerates CBS Corp. and Viacom Inc. are back under the same roof. The two companies' $12 billion merger closed after market hours on Wednesday. The combined entity has been renamed ViacomCBS Inc.

CBS and Viacom Are Still Selling Wall Street on Their Deal

(Bloomberg) -- Viacom Inc. and CBS Corp. completed their merger on Wednesday, ending three years of on-and-off talks and creating what they boast is an entertainment colossus without peer. The hope is that the combined company, rechristened ViacomCBS Inc., will spit out hit TV shows and movies faster than you can say Netflix.But Wall Street has been skeptical. Shares in both companies have tumbled more than 14% since they announced plans to combine in August, erasing billions of dollars in market value. Shareholders of CBS have sued the company in Delaware, alleging the merger only benefits its controlling shareholder, National Amusements Inc., the movie-theater chain owned by the Redstone family.The shares began to rebound on Wednesday, a sign that investors are finally warming to the deal. But ViacomCBS still has a long way to go before winning over skeptics.Even media analysts, typically a staid and supportive bunch, have questioned the logic of the deal. Michael Nathanson, co-founder of Moffett Nathanson LLC, dubbed an October filing that outlined details of the merger “an abject disaster.”That wasn’t the reception Shari Redstone was hoping for when she began agitating for a merger of the two companies back in 2016. That was when she supplanted her father, Sumner Redstone, as the public face of a family business with a clear goal: reunite the two companies that her father split apart in 2006.Wall Street was mixed on the deal at the time, but saw the logic for Viacom. The owner of MTV and Nickelodeon was losing teenagers to Netflix, advertisers to YouTube and confidence among its own employees. Combining with CBS would give the combined company the heft to negotiate better deals with pay-TV operators and advertisers.CEO ClashesYet the family met resistance from the leadership of both companies, leading to legal disputes with both Viacom chief Philippe Dauman, her dad’s old lawyer, and CBS boss Les Moonves, a TV industry legend. Dauman was fired in 2016, and Moonves was ousted last year after more than a dozen women accused him of sexual misconduct.Now that the merger is finally a reality, it looks late -- and the combined company looks small. ViacomCBS has a market capitalization of about $20 billion, a fraction of heavyweights Walt Disney Co., Comcast Corp., AT&T Inc. and Netflix Inc. Its $27 billion in annual sales is a fraction of all those companies but Netflix, which is growing at a much faster rate.Redstone would prefer investors look at another number: the $13 billion that the two companies are spending annually on TV shows and movies. That figure puts ViacomCBS in the same league as the biggest entertainment companies in the world, and speaks to what Redstone and Viacom chief Bob Bakish have said is a differentiated strategy. While AT&T, Comcast and Disney trip over one another to create their own Netflix, ViacomCBS will sell to all of them.Viacom’s Paramount produces “Jack Ryan” for Amazon, while Nickelodeon just signed a deal to make programs for Netflix. CBS both produces “Dead to Me” for Netflix and several shows for its own streaming service.Shares RallySome investors are coming over to their way of thinking. Viacom rallied the most since May on Wednesday, climbing as much as 6.1%. CBS rose as much as 6.2%. Both stocks came off their highs by the close, each rising more than 3%. ViacomCBS begins trading under the symbols VIACA and VIAC on Thursday.“It’s somewhat frustrating the way the stocks have traded; it’s like there are no believers out there,” said John Miller, a senior vice president at Ariel Investments, which holds stock in both companies. “We continue to believe this merger makes complete sense.”Miller said he expects “unbelievable” political advertising revenue in the 2020 election cycle, and said the companies are bringing together valuable programming. “The combination will make both companies stronger,” he said.Still, the combined company’s strategy remains confusing to many. At the same time it licenses “South Park,” one of its most popular programs, to AT&T’s HBO Max, ViacomCBS will maintain its own streaming service, All Access. The spending on original programming for All Access and Showtime is what prompted Nathanson to use the phrase “abject disaster” in the first place. The cash burn from that spending exceeded his forecast.Tough SpotBakish, who will run the combined company, is in an unenviable position. He doesn’t want to give up on the money he can get licensing programs to streaming services starved for hit shows, but he can’t forgo the world of streaming altogether. Wall Street has rewarded Disney for taking on Netflix head-to-head, but it is in the unique position of owning Marvel, “Star Wars” and Pixar.Investors’ concerns don’t stop there. They expected more cost synergies. They wanted more insight into how the two companies would benefit one another. Press appearances from Bakish have done little to assuage their concerns.But competing on the internet is not the only -- or even the main -- rationale for doing the deal. It does create a formidable TV company that will own the most-watched U.S. network, the most-watched kids’ TV network, one of the major Hollywood studios and a premium cable network in Showtime. All together, they will command more than 20% of TV viewing and the largest audience in almost every demographic of any company.“It’s a reach story,” Bakish told Bloomberg News in an interview the day the deal was announced. “We will have the largest TV business in the U.S. on a combined basis, and it strengthens our position to create value.”Bakish, Redstone and the leadership at CBS all say they’re convinced this deal is a no-brainer. Now they just need to convince everyone else.(Updates with deal’s completion in first paragraph, shares in 11th paragraph.)To contact the reporter on this story: Lucas Shaw in Los Angeles at lshaw31@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Nick Turner at nturner7@bloomberg.net, John J. Edwards IIIFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

Here’s What Hedge Funds Think About Viacom, Inc. (VIAB)

We are still in an overall bull market and many stocks that smart money investors were piling into surged through the end of November. Among them, Facebook and Microsoft ranked among the top 3 picks and these stocks gained 54% and 51% respectively. Hedge funds' top 3 stock picks returned 41.7% this year and beat […]

CBS ordered to disclose internal records on Viacom deal

The deal is scheduled to close on Dec. 4, combining CBS television network, CBS News, Showtime cable networks with MTV Networks, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and the Paramount movie studios. The judge, Joseph Slights of Delaware's Court of Chancery, ordered CBS to turn over materials the CBS board discussed when considering the merger with Viacom, which was split from CBS 13 years ago. The company was also ordered to provide documents regarding the nomination and appointment of board members to the special committee that approved the merger earlier this year, as well as some communications between Redstone and the board.

CBS and Viacom to close merger on Dec. 4

Shares of the combined company, which would be renamed as ViacomCBS Inc, are expected to start trading on Nasdaq from Dec.5 under the new ticker symbols "VIACA" and "VIAC", the companies said. Earlier in August, CBS and Viacom agreed to merge, creating a company with more than $28 billion in revenue, as an increasingly competitive media landscape prompted their controlling shareholder to reunify the U.S. entertainment companies 13 years after breaking them up. The two companies are controlled by National Amusements Inc, the holding company owned by billionaire Sumner Redstone and his family.

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Justice Dept. seeks to end 70-year-old Hollywood antitrust rules

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Viacom's Charts Can't Divine Impact on Price Action of CBS Merger

For his first Executive Decision segment of "Mad Money" Thursday, Jim Cramer spoke with Bob Bakish, president and CEO of Viacom Inc. , which just reported its final quarter as an independent company before its planned merger with CBS Corp. . Shares of Viacom, which is a holding of Cramer's Action Alerts PLUS charitable trust, rose by 1.9% on Thursday. Bakish said Viacom was able to deliver on all its promises for 2019 and it looks forward to the CBS merger, which is expected to close in early December.

Viacom Remains Too Cheap to Ignore After Earnings Beat

Buy Viacom between its weekly value level at $19.83 and its monthly risky level at $23.75. The stock is too cheap to ignore both fundamentally and technically.