• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, 3 hours ago

Apparently Larry Ellison's $40 billion personal boost in equity financing to aid his son’s $108 billion Paramount Skydance deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery isn’t enough.

All that means higher bidding -- and value -- is coming, according to media analysts. Perhaps in places we were not expecting.

In early Tuesday morning trading of WBD stock, the pricing was still under the $30-a-share valuation. The stock is now $29.14 a share -- up around 1%.

This does not seem to give more weight to Paramount’s high-profile “hostile” attempt at a takeover, where it could look to buy shares directly from WBD shareholders, disregarding the WBD board recommendations to go with the Netflix bid.

At this rate, investors might seemingly be still hedging toward Netflix's all-cash offer. For its part, Netflix's share price was virtually unchanged most of the day on Tuesday, remaining in the $93.30 to $93.50 range.

The changes in Paramount’s new offer were necessary, but not sufficient," said Alex Fitch, portfolio manager/director of U.S. Research at Harris Oakmark, a major WBD investor, according to Reuters.

The WBD board previously rejected Paramount's bid due to lack of a firm Ellison family commitment, although Paramount amended the offer with a guarantee and high regulatory contingent fee.

Still, Fitch is not convinced, either way, saying: "We see the two deals as a toss-up, and there is a cost to changing paths. If Paramount is serious about winning, they’re going to need to provide a greater incentive."

So this goes a long way -- but also tangentially speaks to what may be a notion of strong media value in surprising places.

The good news for Warner Bros. Discovery is that in an age of media disruption to old-school media platforms, we now glean from this bidding war a growing sense of worth in all these businesses.

This is not just for Warner Bros. film and TV studio and the HBO Max streaming, but also WBD’s dozen or so U.S. ad-supported cable TV networks (and others globally) now called Discovery Global.

This came via a bid last week from mini-major film studio/cable TV network group Lionsgate for ad-supported cable TV networks -- CNN, TNT, HGTV, Food Network, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and many others.

WBD has been pursuing a plan to launch its cable networks as a publicly-stock market traded company. Paramount also wants this division -- as part of its overall WBD.

So do we have -- dare we say -- a bidding war of sorts... for cable TV?