• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, Yesterday

WBD’s decision to split itself into two entirely different, separately traded companies represents a big change from a separation plan the company announced last December.

Last December, the company announced its intention to split its legacy cable assets and its streaming and studio assets into two “distinct operating divisions” with Warner Bros. Discovery remaining as parent company.

This week’s announcement seems to have removed the parent-company idea from the scenario, so much so that each of the two new entities will now have its own CEO.

Warner Bros. Discovery President and CEO David Zaslav will become president and CEO of the streaming and studios company. 

Moving from CEO of the all-encompassing WBD to CEO of a company representing half of that seems like a demotion. 

Meanwhile, Gunnar Wiedenfels, CFO of Warner Bros. Discovery, will serve as president and CEO of the legacy cable company. From CFO to CEO sounds like a promotion.

The move announced Monday morning (the press release arrived in my inbox at 7:03 a.m.) can be interpreted as an acknowledgement that Discovery’s merger with Warner Bros. in 2022 into one big content behemoth did not work. The split seems basically to be a reversal of all that.

It was also inevitable for the simple reason that basic cable’s a drag and everybody knows it. 

Comcast already spun off its own cable networks into a new company first called SpinCo and now called Versant. 

By splitting off its cable assets into their own company, the WBD cable networks such as Food Network, TLC, HGTV and CNN will now be challenged as a group to sink or swim on their own.

Meanwhile, the other new company encompassing WBD’s streaming and studio assets will forge a different path guided by its own strategy unbeholden to the outmoded, legacy distribution system known as cable TV. 

What will these two companies be named? This was unclear -- at least to me -- from the news release.

The basic cable company is referred to in the announcement as Global Networks, a change from Global Linear Networks in last December’s press release.

The other new company goes by the name of Streaming & Studios in this week’s release. Both names sound so generic that they seem like placeholders for real names to come.

During David Zaslav’s three years since the merger at the top of WBD, the company’s stock price has fallen 59%, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The company also lost out on a new NBA rights package for the first time since 1988, and just last week, the WSJ reported that WBD shareholders voted against a Zaslav pay package in 2024 of $51.9 million (the vote was symbolic, not binding).

The naming of separate CEOs for the two new companies would indicate that each company’s management structures will also be separate, although the identities of the various holders of upper management positions in the two companies were not divulged.

Nor was it clear if the new companies would each have its own board of directors, which seems likely if the two are truly going to be separate in the manner described in the announcement.

In fact, a lot was not divulged when you stop and think about it. Instead, this release was a collection of airy platitudes about the greatness of Warner Bros. Discovery. 

Well, if this company and its many worldwide brands are so great, why is the whole thing being taken apart? This process is due to be completed by mid-2026. 

Above photos (l-r): Comedian Retta from HGTV’s “Ugliest House in America” and Pablo Pascal from “The Last of Us” on HBO and HBO Max.