• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, December 17, 2025

While Paramount battles Netflix for supremacy over Warner Bros. buyout proposals, we wonder about other media companies' prospects going forward -- Comcast Corp. in particular.

Comcast did make a bid for Warner Bros. -- making the Monday morning Warner Bros. deadline period.

No matter. WBD made an earlier Friday decision -- somewhat shockingly -- to take a Netflix deal.

Going into the process, analysts figured Paramount and Comcast -- two longtime legacy media movie-studio/TV network competitors -- were in the likely position to acquire the company.

Now, a week or so later, Comcast seems pretty much out of the hunt. Like Paramount and Netflix, Comcast has been heavily pursuing WBD’s studio and streaming business.

The main difference between the Comcast bid and the others involves a different strategy for the WBD cable networks.

It could have placed that group in its Versant spinoff publicly traded company -- the company that will house Comcast cable networks, including MS NOW, CNBC, USA Network and others.

But this is not what most analysts -- or WBD's perspective -- were focused on.

From WBD's point of view, it was looking at the bigger picture: at how much of a premium WBD could offer for the most desired part of the company -- its studios and streaming.

That part of the deal seems to be valued at around $75 billion or so (rough approximations of Netflix and Paramount offers).

That means the cable TV group would be valued at around $18 billion to $20 billion or so -- coming from an approximate Paramount bid of $108 billion.

In stock-market terms, some analysts value this part of the deal at just $3 a share --at best -- or even less at as little as $1 a share.

Speaking an industry conference last week, Mike Cavanagh, president of Comcast Corp. said: ‘We didn’t expect that we had a high likelihood of prevailing with a deal that made sense to us. We debated whether to bother or not. Do we want disruption? Do we want the distraction?”

Cavanagh did not want to be “stressing” out Comcast's balance sheet. So its offer was modest but calculating. It made a kind-of-a look-and-see offer.

This resulted in Comcast just looking at its stock -- not cash -- as the means to buy the company, as well as combining the WBD’s cable networks into its Versant group.

The irony is that Netflix was supposed to be making this casual offer with Comcast as a more serious threat.

One wonders whether the future will look well on Comcast’s less-than-aggressive approach.