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With more media giants dealing with unprofitable streaming arms, fewer consumers may be willing to shell out some money for pay TV bundles and investors are left wondering if more consolidation is going is still in the cards. Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslov telling reporters at the Sun Valley Conference quote, over the next year or two, you're going to see some real consolidation. Whether that happens with companies buying each other or going after streaming together. For more on the landscape for the media industry, we want to bring in Rich Greenfield. He's LightShed Partners, partner and media and technology analyst. Rich, it's great to have you back. So let's start there with consolidation. My question to you is consolidation necessarily the answer here for companies that are struggling? And why or why not?

Well, look, you know, I think everyone talks about consolidation because they are struggling to really have their streaming apps be used. You know, the amount of usage of applications like Peacock or Paramount Plus or even Max pales in comparison to what is happening at Netflix, let alone YouTube. Those are the industry leaders. I mean, in fact, the piece we put out yesterday, Netflix and YouTube represent 45%, over 45% of all time spent streaming on a television. That's just, you know, two players dominating. No one ever dominated linear TV the way Netflix and YouTube dominate streaming TV.

And that's a huge problem. And consolidation helps a little bit, but the reality is these companies need to invest in a tremendously larger amount of content and drive people through technology algorithms, really invest heavily to get people to spend more time because right now the big problem they're facing, people just don't watch these things a whole heck of a lot.

It's interesting since you bring up YouTube, I'm going to go in on this because, uh, there's this regulation question and question about whether or not consolidation is going to be tough given regulation, but then you've got this giant streamer of YouTube, which is obviously connected to Alphabet. To what extent do you think YouTube is at a particular risk given that?

Well, look, we made a prediction that no major M&A would happen this year and I think that's what's played out. You know, I don't I think any form of consolidation will likely wait until next year until we see what happens from a regulatory standpoint. I mean, obviously a change in administration, I know there's lots of views on whether JD Vance is a Lena Khan fan or not. But like leave that aside, in general, the Republican party should be more pro consolidation. Maybe not so much pro tech. I mean, we'll see. Obviously, um, former President Trump has certainly made some pretty aggressive comments about his feelings on Facebook and Zuckerberg's, but, um, you know, the the reality is I do think you're going to see forms of consolidation. Maybe big media companies can't merge, but could TV stations like transactions. You're going to see, I think, a much, much more intense M&A season if Republicans take control of the White House, let alone, um, significant parts of Congress. These companies need it. Linear TV is dying, consolidation won't fix the problems, but they'll certainly create more cost savings and slow the bleeding that is happening and accelerating as we speak. On YouTube specifically, look, you know, there's YouTube is getting stronger and stronger and there's lots of government investigations obviously from an antitrust standpoint. We'll see if those continue under a new administration. But, you know, YouTube is the juggernaut, YouTube is getting stronger and stronger. I mean, the fact that YouTube is 25% of all time spent streaming should scare every media executive and media investor that's watching this.