Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels and JB Perrette, head of streaming and games, faced down skeptical media analysts today after losing the NBA and reporting a second quarter mostly below Wall Street forecasts and with a massive write-down stemming, in great part, from what feels like a basketball debacle. “The NBA is a profitable right,” said Wiedenfels.
WBD recently lost the package to Amazon. It had matching rights it tried to assert, that the NBA rejected. Warner sued. Zaslav didn’t mount an especially impassioned defense of the company’s case. “We’re in litigation.
At this point, we have handed it off to our lawyers. We have confidence in our position. The judge will decide whether our matching right, which is 11 pages long, represents an offer where we matched or not.
We’ll see. But we’re getting back to work. The lawyers will handle this, and the judge will decide and off we’ll go.” He declined to get specific when one analyst wondered how WBD would approach carriage negotiations without the NBA in its arsenal. “This is what we do for a living,” Zaslav asserted. “We’re in 200 countries.
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