Paramount’s Big Game Is Still a Sideshow

livemint.com:

Too bad a Super Bowl with Taylor Swift in the stands doesn’t happen every quarter. The record-breaking Super Bowl featuring the world’s biggest pop star will be giving a nice lift to Paramount Global’s beleaguered TV advertising business. On a conference call Wednesday to discuss the company’s fourth-quarter report, Chief Financial Officer Naveen Chopra said Paramount expects low to midteen percentage advertising revenue growth in the first quarter of this year, including the impact from the Super Bowl.

Given that Paramount’s ad business has fallen year over year in the past eight consecutive quarters, with an 11% drop in the fourth quarter being the worst, a turn is undoubtedly good news. Paramount’s share price rose slightly in after-hours trading following Wednesday’s call. But it will likely be a short-term boost at best given the accelerating pace at which cable subscribers are cutting the cord and moving to streaming.

Paramount entered the streaming ad game early, before higher-profile rivals like Disney and Netflix. But the scales still don’t balance evenly. Paramount expanded its streaming ad business by around $260 million in 2023, but its TV ad business shrank by nearly $1.2 billion during the same period.

Paramount is hardly the only traditional media giant struggling with the brutal shift to streaming economics. It is, however, the one bearing the largest “For Sale" sign in the industry. The past couple of months have brought a seemingly endless stream of headlines about suitors knocking on the door.

But no deals have yet emerged, and one potential acquirer—Warner Bros. Discovery—reportedly dropped out this week. That deal would have been a stretch: Warner carries three times as much debt as Paramount and