• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, December 5, 2017

New media companies may look to be agnostic when it comes to characterizing their respective “brands.” After all, what company wants to be identified by just a couple of shows?

Take Netflix. “We’ve been careful to not become a one-brand network,” say Ted Sarandos, CEO of Netflix, at a recent investor conference. “The way to do that is having a lot of variety and executing in multiple genres at a high level.”

Drama, comedies, movies, reality, theatrical films, whatever. Brand or no brand? TV and entertainment is the brand.

Decades ago, TV/media companies looked to build somewhat related cable networks. For example, Viacom's focused on younger viewers or Discovery Communications’ touted older male viewers.

Now with digital media, “channels” and “networks” may be a thing of the past. Think of new definitions as rumors of more media mergers could emerge, especially among traditional media companies.

Over the weekend, there were renewed talks of Walt Disney looking to buy a healthy piece of 21st Century Fox’s TV and movie assets. That's something many believed was unthinkable for decades as Rupert Murdoch marched around the globe acquiring big newspapers, TV and movie assets.

Then on Monday, many media stocks showed sharp hikes in their stock prices -- including Disney and Fox -- all due to speculation of future media consolidation. Walt Disney was 4.7% higher to $110.22; Fox up 2.8% more to $33.09.

Other big gainers were Discovery Communications, up 7.1% to $20.85; AMC Networks, 6.2% higher to $56.15; CBS, gaining 5.2% to $60.10; Comcast Corp., rising 4.9% to $40.32; Viacom, adding 2.8% to $29.18; and Time Warner, with a 1.5% uptick to $97.21.

(Mind you, on the same day all the traditional media companies witnessed big hikes, Netflix lost 1.5% to $184.23.)

TV station groups also witnessed gains on Monday -- with Nexstar Media Group up 4% to $70.75; Sinclair Broadcast Group 2% higher to $34.60; Tegna up 4% to $13.94; and Tribune Media gaining 1% to $41.54.

This comes despite the U.S. Department of Justice looking to stop the AT&T/Time Warner $85 billion merger with a lawsuit.

So what’s the answer? To be everything to everyone? Isn’t that what the major broadcast networks tried doing during the 1980s and '90s? Yes. And just for good measure, go ahead and identify each of those network "brands" in those years.