Versant Media CEO Mark Lazarus said the company spun off by Comcast/NBCUniversal earlier this year is unlikely to be a buyer if Skydance looks to shop some of its dozens of cable TV networks.
“Buying more cable assets on a large scale would prolong our life but not necessarily make our life better because we would still have the secular decline,” Lazarus said Tuesday at the Axios Media Trends Live conference in New York. “Might there be some interest in another vertical that we could create around a pay television business? Yes, but just buying big networks or a bunch of networks that don’t necessarily change our trajectory is probably not in our short-term future.”
Versant owns a swath of former NBCU cable networks like MS NOW (formerly MSNBC), CNBC and USA. It also has a portfolio of digital properties like movie ticketing service Fandango and tee-time reservation platform Golf Now.
Executives have said they hope to make digital the primary source of total company revenue in the coming years, a time horizon Lazarus estimated at three to five years. Currently, he said, digital is less than 25% of the whole pie.
The merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery into Skydance closed earlier this month and created a media giant with more than 50 cable networks. Given the ongoing downturn of viewing and advertising on cable, speculation has continued that Skydance could try to offload some of its cable. The company has said it is aiming not to shed any networks, instead using their cash flow to pay down debt and invest in other areas.
Versant has faced skepticism since its January debut, with its stock price falling 29%. Lazarus conceded that the company still needs to “prove out our thesis.”
Asked about Comcast’s plan to spin out NBCUniversal and whether Versant would ever consider a reunion with NBCU down the road, Lazarus hedged a bit. “Our cash flow is really strong, and I think we will find our path, whether it’s on our own transformation or alongside someone else, but no, that wouldn’t be the plan to necessarily go back to them,” he said.
Lazarus said Versant is considering renewing its deal with NBCU to handle its advertising sales as well as options like outsourcing it to another big media company or bringing it in-house.
“So far, it’s going very well,” the former NBCU exec said of the sales arrangement. “We provide scale and reach and efficient media to their big, big fancy sports stuff. We know that salesforce well, I oversaw that for a long time. So it’s going very well. You know, at some point, you know, in the next a year from now or so, as we get to a natural window, we’ll sit down with them and decide if it should go on or not. But if we both agree, it should go on, we would do that.”