• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, 8 hours ago

Mid-size network AMC Global Media did what was in its best interest with one of its biggest assets in a tough marketplace.

It made an eye-popping five-year, $500 million deal with dominant streaming platform Netflix to license its biggest TV content brand, “The Walking Dead,” in a co-exclusive deal that allows the brand to stream the content on both Netflix and AMC's own in-house platform AMC+.

The deal is for all seven series under “The Walking Dead” brand.

All this will help supplement what analysts say is a “modestly weaker streaming subscription growth trajectory,”, says Michael Morris, media analyst of Guggenheim Securities.

The company posted that streaming revenue increased 6% to $180 million during its second-quarter period. At the same time, company-wide revenues are down 9% to $547.5 million.

Looking at the rest of the year, Morris hopes new cable TV network carriage renewals revenue will climb at AMC deals coming from Comcast Corp. and YouTube.

All this will also help AMC Networks' still soft national TV advertising trends, which declined by mid-single digit percentage after adjusting for “one-time system integration” issues. Overall, advertising was down 11% to $109 million.

The mid-sized traditional cable TV group is doing what it can in a rapidly changing legacy TV network marketplace that has already shown wear and tear -- even with the bigger players.

Apart from their merger issues, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Skydance are still concerned about weakening business issues with their cable TV networks. Earlier this year, Comcast spun off its cable TV networks, under a new publicly traded company, Versant Media.

Netflix/AMC clearly shows what the future brings for those legacy TV-movie companies and their own production capability: they may need to move to a “guns for hire” perspective -- to produce TV and movie programming and sell them to big streaming cash-rich platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Apple TV. This would increase new episodes and series as well as library programming.

“‘The Walking Dead’ Netflix deal validates the studio-based IP ownership model,” says Morris.

He adds: “Management emphasized that the co-exclusive structure was a deliberate strategic choice, allowing AMC to bring the original ‘The Walking Dead’ series to AMC+ for the first time while leveraging Netflix's global distribution reach.”

That’s right -- for the first time. One might have figured that series would have been good to keep in-house to help it push up its streaming platform.

What is the bottom line? If you only wanted to see “ The Walking Dead” and you had to choose between Netflix and AMC+ -- which would you choose?

This goes directly to the point of view about what the “must have” streaming platforms are.

Analysts and observers might correctly answer this question while they are walking in their sleep.