Tom Freston

I'm good, Carol.

Hello to you.

And hi, Tim.

Nice to be here.

Well, I mean, we had during my era, the 80s and the 90s, so the early 2000s, sort of the cable TV revolution, which morphed into the digital revolution and streaming and all that, where people really...

got to watch whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, on whatever device.

And now we're moving into the AI revolution.

So the media industry is in a constant state of flux, always sort of, you know, influenced greatly by technology.

And, you know, it's hard to say where it's going to go, but we're going to see more consolidation amongst the legacy media companies, that's for sure.

There's a few deals in place right now, as you know.

Yeah I think it's a better fit and you know you hate to see another movie studio sort of disappear in a form of consolidation and Warner Brothers is like the king of you know the most treasured studio of all but of the two alternatives I think the Netflix one is more interesting and bodes better for people in the business and bodes better for consumers.

In the case of Paramount you really have two legacy companies

Merging together, they talk about $9 billion worth of cost savings, and that means more people on the street.

It's not that interesting of a combination as taking someone like Netflix, which is sort of a quasi-digital company, and marrying that with Warner Brothers seems to be a better fit, if you were to ask me, which you just did.

Well, I think he'd be sad.

He'd be sad to see what became of the empire that he was a major force in creating and how the values deteriorated and how Viacom sort of missed the moment, if you will.

They missed the moment in the digital transition.

You just compare it to Disney, which spent, say, they doubled down on their content creative abilities.

They spent $16 billion buying Pixar and Lucasfilm and Marvel, which made them a little more invincible.

On the other hand, Viacom spent $16 billion on stock buybacks, which was great if you were cashing in stock options, but not so good for the long-term viability of the company.