WBD’s New Structure Will Provide Opportunity to ‘Go On Offense or Defense’ Amid Linear Upheaval, David Zaslav Says

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav says the company’s new reporting structure, in which it will separate its linear business from streaming and studios divisions starting next quarter, will provide more “strategic clarity” to both Wall Street and Hollywood.

“We’re always looking at shareholder value, and we really see these as two very different businesses,” Zaslav told an investor conference hosted by Morgan Stanley. “This will give a chance for you all to see all the characteristics of growth and opportunity and challenge that we see. So that will help us get fair value.”

He added that the new structure will also provide an opportunity to more easily respond to changes in the marketplace.

“It’ll give us an opportunity at the right time if we make a determination to go on offense or defense in different ways, because we’re already structured that way,” Zaslav said. “We’ve made a lot of progress in finalizing that structure, so I’m excited about it.”

Zaslav’s comments and the restructuring of its business come as WBD’s linear division saw profit decline 13% to $1.92 billion and revenue tumble 5% to $4.77 billion in the fourth quarter of 2024, driven by continued pay TV subscriber declines and softness in the domestic linear advertising market.

On Tuesday, Zaslav said WBD is making changes to the way it programs its 29 cable channels to create more shareholder and economic value, including looking at how much content its producing and bringing HBO content to TNT and TBS that it doesn’t plan on licensing to competitors.

“Our food team, our home team, our [Investigation Discovery] team, they’re like studios. So instead of looking at them as cable channels, we start to say, what is the productivity of each of their shows, and how does that work in terms of how good is that content around the world? How good is that content on streaming?,” Zaslav said. “So we’re not going to be able to fight against this decline, but things like that, using more library, being very measured on what content we produce and how much we produce, which we can change and make variable, and producing more content that works also on our streaming service, I think, will be a real helper to us.”

More to come…

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