Technology

David Zaslav’s top priority at Warner Bros. Discovery: Get the cash flowing again

Published

2 years ago

December 6, 2022

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David Zaslav

Olivia Michael | CNBC

A few months ago, after a lengthy and sobering review of Warner Bros. Discovery‘s business, Chief Executive David Zaslav gave his division heads a cutthroat mission.

Pretend your units are family businesses, Zaslav said. Start from scratch and prioritize free cash flow, he added, according to people familiar with the matter. Then, Zaslav said, come back to me with a new strategic plan for your unit.

Zaslav’s directive has led to what will amount to thousands of layoffs at the company by the middle of this month, said the people, along with substantial strategic changes at CNN, the Warner Bros. film studio and other divisions.

The CEO formed his plan after he took a hard look at the finances of the combined WarnerMedia-Discovery, a deal that closed in April. Zaslav determined the company was a mess. AT&T mismanaged WarnerMedia through neglect and profligate spending, he’d decided, according to people familiar with his discussions. The people asked not to be identified because the talks were private.

Warner Bros. Discovery’s total debt of about $50 billion was tens of billions more than the company’s market capitalization. About $5 billion of that debt is due by the end of 2024 after paying off $6 billion since the close of the merger. The company could push back the maturity on some bonds if necessary, but interest rates have risen dramatically, making refinancing much costlier.

To pay down debt, any company needs cash — ideally, from operations. But the near-term trends suggested Warner Bros. Discovery’s business was getting worse, not better. The company announced free cash flow for the third quarter was negative $192 million, compared to $705 million a year earlier. Cash from operating activities was $1.5 billion for the first nine months of 2022, down from $1.9 billion a year earlier.

Along with the rise in rates, Netflix‘s global revenue and subscriber growth had slowed, prompting investors to bail on peer stocks — including Warner Bros. Discovery, which had spent the past three years developing streaming services HBO Max and Discovery+. Moreover, the advertising market was collapsing as corporate valuations flagged. Zaslav said last month the ad market has been weaker than at any point during the 2020 pandemic.

Cash rules everything

Malone has co-strategized and cheered Zaslav’s effort to focus the company on maximizing free cash flow, which is defined as net income plus depreciation and amortization minus capital expenditures.

“Whenever I talk to David, the first thing I say is manage your cash,” Malone said last month. “Cash generation will ultimately be the metric that David’s success or failure will be judged on.”

Even before Zaslav gave his directive to all of the division heads, the new CEO was already thinking about how to boost cash flow. That was at least part of the motivation to eliminate CNN+ just weeks after it launched, which had a spending budget of about $165 million in 2022 and an eventual $350 million, according to people familiar with the matter.

Warner Bros. Discovery owns streaming services, linear cable networks, a movie studio, a TV production studio and digital properties. It owns DC Comics, HBO, CNN, Bleacher Report, and oodles of reality TV programming. It has sports rights both internationally and domestically, including the NBA on TNT.

Zaslav hopes his reconstruction of Warner Bros. Discovery will deliver two results. First, it will showcase the company as a fully diversified content machine, featuring top brands and intellectual property in prestige TV (HBO), movies (Warner Bros.), reality TV (Discovery), kids and superheroes (Looney Tunes, DC), news (CNN) and sports (NBA, NCAA March Madness).

Liberty Media’s John Malone

Michael Kovac | Getty Images

Second, he wants it to prove that a modern media company that’s spending billions on streaming video can also generate billions in cash flow. The company has estimated 2023 EBITDA will be $12 billion. Warner Bros. Discovery will generate more than $3 billion in free cash flow this year, about $4 billion next year and close to $6 billion in free cash flow in 2024, according to company forecasts.

That would give Zaslav a selling point to investors compared to other legacy media companies. Disney has generated just $1 billion of free cash flow over the past 12 months and analysts estimate the company will have about $2 billion in 2023. That’s despite growing Disney+, its flagship streaming service, by 46 million subscribers during the period and owning a theme park business that generated $28.7 billion in revenue for the fiscal year — up 73% from a year earlier.

The low free cash flow relates largely to the money drain from streaming services and Disney’s large investments in theme parks. Over the past 12 months, Disney had $4.2 billion in operating income from its media properties, down 42% from a year ago. Returning Disney CEO Bob Iger said in a town hall last month he will prioritize profitability over streaming growth — a change from when he left the post in 2020. Outgoing boss Bob Chapek put into place a Dec. 8 price hike for Disney+ and other streaming services to accelerate cash flow.

“Discovery was a free cash flow machine,” Zaslav said earlier this year of his former company, which he ran for more than 15 years before merging it with WarnerMedia. “We were generating over $3 billion in free cash flow for a long time. Now, we look at Warner generating $40 billion of revenue and almost no free cash flow, with all of the great IP that they have.”

Wall Street vs. Sunset Boulevard

When AT&T announced it was merging WarnerMedia with Discovery Communications last year, Zaslav immediately went on a Hollywood “listening tour,” sensing an opportunity to become the new king of Tinseltown. Many Hollywood power players thought Zaslav would dedicate his first year as CEO to currying favor with the industry given his lack of history with scripted TV or movies. He even bought producer Bob Evans’ house for $16 million in Beverly Hills, a sign some thought meant he wanted to be Hollywood’s next mogul.

A year later, Zaslav isn’t the king. In fact, many consider him a villain.

It turned out Zaslav’s top priority as CEO of a large public company wasn’t to win over Hollywood. Rather, it was to convince investors his company could survive and flourish as a relative minnow against much larger sharks, including Apple, Amazon, Disney and Netflix, in an entertainment world that’s quickly moving to digital distribution.

Zaslav’s focus on investors before Hollywood makes business sense. The company must be financially sound before it can make big investments. But he’s taken a hit, reputationally, with some in the creative community.

“HBO Max is widely acknowledged to be the best streaming service. And now the execs who bought it are on the verge of dismantling it, simply because they feel like it,” tweeted Adam Conover, the creator and host of “The G Word” on Netflix and “Adam Ruins Everything” on HBO Max, in August. “Mergers give just a few wealthy people MASSIVE control over what we watch, with disastrous results.”

One Hollywood insider who met with Zaslav to give him advice before he stepped into the job said the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO has ignored 90% of his advice on how to manage the business.

Time will tell whether Zaslav’s year-one decisions have lasting ramifications with a spurned Hollywood community. Critics of Iger at Disney initially said he lacked “creative vision” when he first took over as chief executive nearly two decades ago.

Zaslav can counter that Warner Bros. Discovery hasn’t decreased content spending. The company spent about $22 billion on programming in 2022. But he’s also made cost consciousness a point of pride.

“We’re going to spend more on content — but you’re not going to see us come in and go, ‘Alright, we’re going to spend $5 billion more,'” Zaslav said in February. “We’re going to be measured, we’re going to be smart and we’re going to be careful.”

The company’s content decisions have been based on strategic corrections, such as eliminating made-for-streaming movies and cutting back on kids and family programming that don’t materially entice new subscribers or hold existing ones, executives determined. Warner Bros. Discovery’s HBO continues to churn out hits, including “White Lotus,” “Euphoria,” “House of the Dragon” and “Succession,” under the leadership of Casey Bloys.

V Anderson | WireImage | Getty Images

‘We don’t have to have the NBA’

Perhaps Zaslav’s biggest dilemma is what to do with the NBA.

Like other media companies, Warner Bros. Discovery rents the rights to carry games and pays billions to leagues for the privilege. Warner Bros. Discovery currently pays around $1.2 billion per year to put NBA games on TNT. In 2014, the last time the league struck a deal with TNT and Disney’s ESPN, carriage rights rose from $930 million to $2.6 billion per year.

Negotiations to renew TNT’s NBA rights will begin in earnest next year. Zaslav has said he has little interest in paying a huge increase just to carry games again on cable networks — a platform that loses millions of subscribers each year.

“We don’t have to have the NBA,” Zaslav said Nov. 15 at an investor conference. “With sport, we’re a renter. That’s not as good of a business.”

The problem for Zaslav is keeping legacy pay TV afloat may be his best way to keep cash flow coming, and putting NBA games on TNT may be his best chance to do that. In the third quarter, Warner Bros. Discovery’s cable network business had adjusted EBITDA of $2.6 billion on $5.2 billion of revenue. That’s compared with a direct-to-consumer business that lost $634 million.

If Warner Bros. Discovery is going to pay billions of dollars a year for the NBA, Zaslav wants a deal to be future-focused. He has the luxury of having NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s ear for the next three years because the NBA will be on TNT through the end of the 2024-25 season.

“If we do a deal on the NBA, it’s going to look a lot different,” Zaslav said.

Charles Barkley on Inside the NBA

Source: NBA on TNT

Warner Bros. Discovery knows how to produce NBA games and airs a studio show, “Inside the NBA,” which is widely regarded as the best in professional sports. It’s possible Zaslav could strike a deal with another bidder, such as Amazon or Apple, which may allow Warner Bros. Discovery to produce their games while giving him a package of games that came with a lower price tag.

Ideally, Zaslav would like to do sports deals that include ownership of intellectual property. This is also appealing to Netflix, The Wall Street Journal reported last month. Acquiring leagues gets Zaslav out of the rental business. But while smaller professional sports leagues, such as Formula One and UFC, are owned by media companies (Malone’s Liberty Media and Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor, respectively), it seems unlikely NBA owners would agree to sell Warner Bros. Discovery a stake in the league.

Silver said last month at the SBJ Dealmakers Conference he was open to rights deals structured in novel ways.

“We’re in the enviable position right now of letting the marketplace work its magic a little bit, you know, to see where the best ideas are going to come from, what’s going to drive the best value,” Silver said.

It’s also possible Zaslav could walk away from the NBA completely. While “Inside the NBA” co-host Charles Barkley recently signed a 10-year contract to stay with Warner Bros. Discovery, it includes an out clause if Zaslav doesn’t re-up the NBA, according to The New York Post.

Live sports aren’t necessarily essential to most streaming services’ success. Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max all have zero live sports — at least for now.

The one certainty is Zaslav’s decision will be squarely based on how a deal affects the company’s free cash flow.

“It’s how much do we make on the sport?” Zaslav said. “When I was at NBC, when we lost football [in 1998], we lost the promotion of the NFL, which was a huge issue. Then you have the overall asset value without the sport. So you have to evaluate all that.”

WATCH: John Malone on streaming platform distinctions

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Technology

Chinese medical devices are in health systems across U.S., and the government and hospitals are worried

Published

10 hours ago

February 23, 2025

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Chinese medical devices are in health systems across U.S., and the government and hospitals are worried

A popular medical monitor is the latest device produced in China to receive scrutiny for its potential cyber risks.  However, it is not the only health device we should be concerned about. Experts say the proliferation of Chinese health-care devices in the U.S. medical system is a cause for concern across the entire ecosystem.

The Contec CMS8000 is a popular medical monitor that tracks a patient’s vital signs.  The device tracks electrocardiograms, heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, non-invasive blood pressure, temperature, and respiration rate.  In recent months, the FDA and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) both warned about a “backdoor” in the device, an “easy-to-exploit vulnerability that could allow a bad actor to alter its configuration.”  

CISA’s research team described “anomalous network traffic” and the backdoor “allowing the device to download and execute unverified remote files” to an IP address not associated with a medical device manufacturer or medical facility but a third-party university — “highly unusual characteristics” that go against generally accepted practices, “especially for medical devices.”

“When the function is executed, files on the device are forcibly overwritten, preventing the end customer—such as a hospital—from maintaining awareness of what software is running on the device,” CISA wrote.

The warnings says such configuration alteration could lead to, for instance, the monitor saying that a patient’s kidneys are malfunctioning or breathing failing, and that could cause medical staff to administer unneeded remedies that could be harmful.

The Contec’s vulnerability doesn’t surprise medical and IT experts who have warned for years that medical device security is too lax.

Hospitals are worried about cyber risks

“This is a huge gap that is about to explode,” said Christopher Kaufman, a business professor at Westcliff University in Irvine, California, who specializes in IT and disruptive technologies, specifically referring to the security gap in many medical devices.

The American Hospital Association, which represents over 5,000 hospitals and clinics in the U.S., agrees. It views the proliferation of Chinese medical devices as a serious threat to the system.

As for the Contec monitors specifically, the AHA says the problem urgently needs to be addressed.

“We have to put this at the top of the list for the potential for patient harm; we have to patch before they hack,” said John Riggi, national advisor for cybersecurity and risk for the American Hospital Association.  Riggi also served in FBI counterterrorism roles before joining the AHA. 

CISA reports that no software patch is available to help mitigate this risk, but in its advisory said the government is currently working with Contec.

Contec, headquartered in Qinhuangdao, China,  did not return a request for comment.

One of the problems is that it is unknown how many monitors there are in the U.S.

“We don’t know because of the sheer volume of equipment in hospitals. We speculate there are, conservatively, thousands of these monitors; this is a very critical vulnerability,” Riggi said, adding that Chinese access to the devices can pose strategic, technical, and supply chain risks.

In the short-term, the FDA advised medical systems and patients to make sure the devices are only running locally or to disable any remote monitoring; or if remote monitoring is the only option, to stop using the device if an alternative is available. The FDA said that to date it is not aware of any cybersecurity incidents, injuries, or deaths related to the vulnerability.

The American Hospital Association has also told its members that until a patch is available, hospitals should make sure the monitor no longer has access to the internet, and is segmented from the rest of the network.

Riggi said the while the Contec monitors are a prime example of what we don’t often consider among health care risk, it extends to a range of medical equipment produced overseas. Cash-strapped U.S. hospitals, he explained, often buy medical devices from China, a country with a history of installing destructive malware inside critical infrastructure in the U.S.  Low-cost equipment buys the Chinese potential access to a trove of American medical information that can be repurposed and aggregated for all sorts of purposes. Riggs says data is often transmitted to China with the stated purpose of monitoring a device’s performance, but little else is known about what happens to the data beyond that.

Riggi says individuals aren’t at acute medical risk as much as the information being collected and aggregated for repurposing and putting the larger medical system at risk. Still, he points out that, at least theoretically, is can’t be ruled out that prominent Americans with medical devices could be targeted for disruption.

“When we talk to hospitals,  CEOS are surprised, they had no idea about the dangers of these devices, so we are helping them understand.  The question for government is how to incentivize domestic production, away from overseas,”  Riggi said.

Chinese data collection on Americans

The Contec warning is similar at a general level to TikTok, DeepSeek, TP-Link routers, and other devices and technology from China that the U.S. government says are collecting data on Americans. “And that is all I need to hear in deciding whether to buy medical devices from China,” Riggi said.

Aras Nazarovas, an information security researcher at Cybernews, agrees that the CISA threat raises serious issues that need to be addressed.

“We have a lot to fear,” Nazarovas said. Medical devices, like the Contec CMS8000, often have access to highly sensitive patient data and are directly connected to life-saving functions.  Nazarovas says that when the devices are poorly defended, they become easy prey for hackers who can manipulate the displayed data, alter vital settings, or disable the device completely.

“In some cases, these devices are so poorly protected that attackers can gain remote access and change how the device operates without the hospital or patients ever knowing,” Nazarovas said.

The consequences of the Contec vulnerability and vulnerabilities in an array of Chinese-made medical devices could easily be life-threatening.

“Imagine a patient monitor that stops alerting doctors to a drop in a patient’s heart rate or sends incorrect readings, leading to a delayed or wrong diagnosis,” Nazarovas said. In the case of the Contec CMS8000, and Epsimed MN-120 (a different brand name for the same tech), warning from the government, these devices were configured to allow remote code execution by the remote server.

“This functionality can be used as an entry point into the hospital’s network,” Nazarovas said, leading to patient danger.

More hospitals and clinics are paying attention. Bartlett Regional Hospital in Juneau, Alaska, does not use the Contec monitors but is always looking for risks. “Regular monitoring is critical as the risk of cybersecurity attacks on hospitals continues to increase,” says Erin Hardin, a spokeswoman for Bartlett.

However, regular monitoring may not be enough as long as devices are made with poor security.

Potentially making matters worse, Kaufman says, is that the Department of Government Efficiency is hollowing out departments in charge of safeguarding such devices. According to the Associated Press, many of the recent layoffs at the FDA are employees who review the safety of medical devices.

Kaufman laments the likely lack of government supervision on what is already, he says, a loosely regulated industry. A U.S. Government Accountability Office report as of January 2022, indicated that 53% of connected medical devices and other Internet of Things devices in hospitals had known critical vulnerabilities. He says the problem has only gotten worse since then. “I’m not sure what is going to be left running these agencies,” Kaufman said.

“Medical device issues are widespread and have been known for some time now,” said Silas Cutler, principal security researcher at medical data company Censys. “The reality is that the consequences can be dire – and even deadly. While high-profile individuals are at heightened risk, the most impacted are going to be the hospital systems themselves, with cascading effects on everyday patients.”

Technology

Substack boosts video capabilities amid potential TikTok ban

Published

12 hours ago

February 23, 2025

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Substack boosts video capabilities amid potential TikTok ban

Rafael Henrique | SOPA Images | AP

After posting almost 200 videos, amassing hundreds of thousands of followers and racking up millions of views, Carla Lalli Music is quitting YouTube. Substack is her new focus.

Music is a cookbook author and food content creator, and she is shifting her focus to Substack, a subscription platform that lets creators charge users subscriptions for access to their content. Music told CNBC she came to that decision after earning more in one year of using Substack, nearly $200,000 in revenue, than she did by posting videos on YouTube since 2021.

Music is the exact kind of content creator that Substack is trying to lure to its platform as TikTok’s future in the U.S. remains in limbo.

San Francisco-based Substack launched in 2017 as a tool for newsletter writers to charge readers a monthly fee to read their content. The platform allows creators to connect to their followers directly without having to navigate algorithmic models that control when their content is shown, as is the case on TikTok, Google’s YouTube and other social platforms. Substack has raised about $100 million, most recently at a post-money valuation of more than $650 million, the company told CNBC.

This year, Substack has broadened its focus beyond newsletters, and on Thursday, it announced that creators can now post video content directly through the Substack app and monetize these videos.

“There’s going to be a world of people who are much more focused on videos,” Substack Co-founder Hamish McKenzie told CNBC. “That is a huge world that Substack is only starting to penetrate.”

Substack began this push after the social media landscape was thrown into flux as a result of the effective ban of TikTok in January that caused the popular Chinese-owned service to go offline for a few hours. TikTok was also removed from Apple and Google’s app stores for nearly a month.

The disruption to TikTok in January happened as a result of a law signed by former President Joe Biden to force a sale of the Chinese-owned app or have it effectively banned in the U.S. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order extending TikTok’s ability to operate in the U.S., but that order expires on April 5.

Days after TikTok went offline, Substack launched a $20 million fund to court creators to its platform.

“If TikTok gets banned for political reasons, there’s nothing to do with the work you’ve done, but it really affects your life,” McKenzie said. “The only and surefire guard against that is if you don’t place your audience in the hands of some other volatile system who doesn’t care about what happens to your livelihood.”

Moving beyond newsletters

McKenzie says that they are going after creators on competing social media platforms to start sharing their video content on Substack.

“Video-first creators, people who are mobile oriented, there’s a whole lot of new possibility waiting to be unlocked once they meet this model in the right place,” McKenzie said.

Already, Substack has more than 4 million paid subscriptions with over 50,000 creators who make money on the platform, the company said. Substack says that 82% of its top 250 revenue-generating creators have already integrated audio or video into their content, reflecting a growing emphasis on multimedia content.

Prior to the video announcements, Substack allowed creators to post videos on the app to Notes, which is the platform’s front-facing feed format. But the feature did not allow creators to publish video content behind Substack’s paywalls.

The update enables creators to put video content behind a paywall and it provides data on estimated revenue impact. It also allows them to track viewership and new subscribers.

Carla Lalli Music is a cookbook writer and food creator.

Carla Lalli Music

The push by Substack into video is a welcomed development for creators like Music, who was losing money from making videos for YouTube.

Music said each video costs her $3,500 to produce despite filming at home. If she published four videos a month on YouTube, she’d earn about $4,000 in revenue. Music was losing about $10,000 a month, she said.

“It’s really depressing to operate at a loss,” said Music.

Even with brand deals, which is an agreement where brands pay creators to post content that promotes their products, the earnings were barely enough to recoup the costs of posting on YouTube, Music said.

More than half of the $290 billion creator economy comes from direct-to-fan value. That includes ticket sales, courses, livestreams and paid memberships, according to a survey conducted by Patreon, a Substack competitor.

With her shift to Substack, Music said she’s now focused on writing another book, posting recipes behind the platform’s paywall and sprinkling in occasional videos.

“I have a lot more to benefit from focused attention on a smaller group of people than I ever did on throwing stuff and seeing what was going to stick with billions of potential audience members,” Music said. “It’s more sustainable.”

WATCH: Our base case for TikTok is that it gets banned in the U.S.: Lead Edge Capital’s Mitchell Green

Technology

Anne Wojcicki has a new offer to take 23andMe private, this time for $74.7 million

Published

2 days ago

February 21, 2025

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Anne Wojcicki has a new offer to take 23andMe private, this time for .7 million

Anne Wojcicki attends the WSJ Magazine Style & Tech Dinner in Atherton, California, on March 15, 2023.

Kelly Sullivan | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki and New Mountain Capital have submitted a proposal to take the embattled genetic testing company private, according to a Friday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Wojcicki and New Mountain have offered to acquire all of 23andMe’s outstanding shares in cash for $2.53 per share, or an equity value of approximately $74.7 million. The company’s stock closed at $2.42 on Friday with a market cap of about $65 million.

The offer comes after a turbulent year for 23andMe, with the stock losing more than 80% of its value in 2024. In January, the company announced plans to explore strategic alternatives, which could include a sale of the company or its assets, a restructuring or a business combination.