comcast

Comcast has officially spun off its cable channels, including CNBC and MS NOW, into a separate company, Versant Media Group.

The transaction was completed late Friday. On Monday, Versant took a major tumble in its stock market debut — providing a key test of investors’ willingness to hold onto legacy cable channels.

The initial outlook wasn’t pretty, providing awkward moments for CNBC anchors reporting the story.

Versant shares fell about 14% to about $40 a share around mid-day. The stock opened Monday on the Nasdaq at $45.17 per share.

Comcast opted to cast off the still-profitable cable channels, except for the perennially popular Bravo!, as Wall Street has soured on the business, which has been contracting amid a consumer shift to streaming.

Versant’s market performance will be closely watched as Warner Bros. Discovery attempts to separate its cable channels, including CNN, TBS and Food Network, from the Warner Bros. studios and HBO later this year. Warner Chief Executive David Zaslav’s plan, which is scheduled to occur this summer, is being contested by the Ellison family’s Paramount, which has launched a hostile bid for all of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Warner Bros. Discovery has agreed to sell itself to Netflix in an $82.7-billion deal.

The market’s distaste for cable channels has been playing out in recent years. Paramount found itself on the auction block two years ago, in part, because of the weight of its struggling cable channels, including Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and MTV.

Management of the New York-based Versant, including longtime NBCUniversal sports and television executive Mark Lazarus, has been bullish on the company’s balance sheet and its prospects for growth. Versant also includes USA Network, Golf Channel, Oxygen, E!, SYFY, Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, GolfNow, GolfPass, and SportsEngine.

“As a standalone company, we enter the market with the scale, strategy and leadership to grow and evolve our business model,” Lazarus, who is Versant’s Chief Executive, said Monday in a statement.

Through the spinoff, Comcast shareholders received one share of Versant Class A common stock or Versant Class B common stock for every 25 shares of Comcast Class A common stock or Comcast Class B common stock, respectively. The Versant shares were distributed after the close of Comcast trading on Friday.

Comcast gained about 3% on Monday, trading at about $28.50.

Comcast Chairman Brian Roberts maintains Versant’s controlling shares.

Walt Disney Co. is on track to fully integrate its streaming platforms Hulu and Disney+ in 2026.

Hulu isn’t disappearing; Disney hasn’t set a date to retire the stand-alone app. But the Burbank entertainment giant is making progress on its plan to fold Hulu content into the Disney+ platform sometime next year.

The Burbank entertainment giant announced last summer that it was merging Hulu programming onto Disney+. Executives declined Tuesday to provide a timetable for the launch of the integrated platform.

“We are building on Disney’s value proposition in streaming by combining Hulu into Disney+ to create a unified app experience featuring branded and general entertainment, news, and sports, resulting in a one-of-a-kind entertainment destination for subscribers,” Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger told Wall Street analysts during an August earnings call.

Disney acquired the controlling stake of Hulu as part of its $72-billion purchase in 2019 of much of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox assets. But the full integration of Hulu was paused until earlier this year, when Disney finalized its purchase of Comcast’s one-third stake in the service after a testy dispute between the two rivals.

Until 2019, Hulu was owned by Comcast’s NBCUniversal, Disney and Fox.

Earlier this month, Disney engineers refreshed the Disney+ homepage to allow users to seamlessly move among its various catalogs — Disney+, Hulu and ESPN.

Disney has said Hulu will live on as the global brand for general entertainment, with such shows as “Only Murders in the Building,” “Paradise” and “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.”

As part of the Mouse House’s choreographed months-long rollout, the company switched the Star tile for international Disney+ customers in October. Now, the green Hulu logo appears for those users. (Star, a popular television service in India, was also among the Fox assets that Disney acquired nearly seven years ago.)

Disney separately operates Hulu + Live TV, a pay-TV service with popular broadcast and cable channels, including ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and ESPN. Eventually, that service will be folded into the Disney+ app.

Hulu subscribers will continue to be able to access the app well into next year.

After the launch of the combined platform, Hulu subscribers will be able to watch Hulu-branded shows, but Disney is designing the experience to entice users to upgrade to a Disney bundle. The company’s goal is for fewer subscribers to drop their plans and, instead, spend more time on the Disney+ app.

As the year draws to a close, Disney is celebrating a successful year at the box office. It released two movies that surpassed $1 billion in global ticket sales: “Zootopia 2,” and “Lilo & Stitch.” The James Cameron movie “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” which debuted this month, so far has made more than $750 million worldwide.

The company’s TV programmers are under pressure to boost their slate of original television and streaming shows.

Disney mustered just three entries in Nielsen’s Streaming Top 10 for the last week of November, according to the rating agency’s most recent report.

All were acquired shows, including “Homeland,” a decade-old Showtime production that runs on both Hulu and Netflix. “Homeland,” starring Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin, was ranked fifth for that week, lagging well behind Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” which broke records. Paramount+’s “Landman,” from Taylor Sheridan, was the second-most popular streaming show.

“Bob’s Burgers,” a show created for Fox and available on Hulu, ranked seventh. “Bluey,” an Australian cartoon distributed by Disney+ was the eighth most popular streaming show.

Disney programmers are preparing reboots of nostalgic 20th Television-produced shows, including “Malcolm in the Middle” and “Scrubs.”