Right now there are no formal talks between the companies and Pivotal Research analyst Jeff Wlodarczak says he’s skeptical a merger will happen. A more likely tie-up would be Comcast’s NBCUniversal, he said.
While the rest of your comment was spot-on, I wanted to comment on this. Especially given I'm no longer doing the power rankings.
The reason that it won't be a merger/buyout with Comcast (NBC/Universal) is simple- there is no way that Paramount (CBS) and Comcast (NBC) will be allowed to merge. Period. Even though it barely matters to most people today, there are serious rules about that, and it's not going to happen.
Which brings us into the real issue- Paramount has a lot of valuable parts, but the sum is a lot less valuable than the whole. Any deals with Paramount have to take into account its unique ownership structure (owned by National Amusements as a holding company). In addition, the various parts have different values- the streaming is actually a serious drag on the stock performance, CBS has value but is declining, the numerous cable networks have value (but are declining even faster), and the studio and content creation parts of the Paramount are still major players and have independent value.
This is why it's likely (if not foreordained) that Paramount would seek to sell off various assets. But how and why to do so would be tricky. The content creation (Paramount studio) would be incredibly valuable to the big tech streamers .... Netflix, Apple, Amazon. CBS (not the terrestrial stations, but the news and sports) could be valuable to WB or Netflix, if they wanted to move into that area or acquire rights to the NFL. Private equity would be interested in milking the remains of the cable stations. And so on.
But how and why they proceed will be interesting.
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