Author: Eric Cohen-Peckham

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Cineworld, the UK-based cinema giant, is backing out of its $1.65B acquisition of Canadian cinema chain Cineplex. (Read more)

I wrote in this newsletter two years ago that cinema chains could be the basis for creating an “Amazon Prime of live entertainment”.

1. Seeking a better biz model, cinema chains would launch subscription memberships giving consumers access to free tickets and discounts on concessions, like AMC Stubs program.
2. These vertically integrated programs inevitably beat third-party ones like MoviePass (RIP) because they actually control the experience and have offer concession discounts (and deeper discounts). Plus the market is so concentrated that any consumer only has 1-3 options of cinema companies to go to…not much leverage for a third-party aggregator.
3. These subscriptions target casual movie-goers (1-5 visits per quarter) who would start attending more (and spending more on concession) as a result of the subscription. In order to expand to the much larger swath of people who only go to cinemas 2-5 times per year, they’ll have to bundle their subscriptions with other live entertainment options.
4. This bundle quickly becomes a competition to be the no-brainer membership to pay for in order to get discounts and special perks for whatever you and your friends want to do on a Friday or Saturday evening…tie-ins with other types of venues, with restaurant chains, with paintball or horseback riding or whatever else.

Amazon’s rumored interest in cinema chains while they are in desperate financial position during the Covid-19 crisis hints that they may see this too, with the additional reason that they could double cinemas as Amazon stores.

Cineplex is the most obvious company for an acquirer to test this thesis since it has 75% market share of Canada’s cinema market, has expanded into VR arcades, esports tournaments, and restaurant chains, and has 1/4 of all Canadian adults already in its free rewards program. It hasn’t launched a membership program yet or done enough to package its assets as one cohesive offering to consumers.

Interesting Deals, Stats, & Product Updates

Digestible Media

Film/TV/Video 

• Snap announced a bunch of new Originals and renewed content deals for its Snapchat Discover section. (Read more)
   
• WarnerMedia is simplifying its confusing portfolio of SVOD apps. HBO Go will be shut down and users moved into the new HBO Max app for free. HBO Now is being renamed simply HBO and will the app for users whose smart TV devices (Fire TV, Roku) don’t yet offer HBO Max. (Read more)
   
• Bain Capital is preparing a $3.4B bid for a ~25% stake in Serie A, Italy’s pro soccer league, according to Bloomberg. The focus is securing a cut of the leagues annual income from selling broadcasting rights. (Read more)
  • The offer competes with an existing one from CVC of $2B for ~20%.
  • Serie A revenue in 2018-19 season was $2.5B, 60% of it from broadcast rights.
  • Mediaset just filed an antitrust complaint in Italy against Sky Italia’s plans to broadcast Serie A matches on free-to-air TV rather than a subscription channel. (Read more)

Music

• Tencent did buy a $200M, 1.6% stake in Warner Music as part of Warner’s IPO. The negotiations had been reported at the time but not confirmed. (Read more)
   
• Tracklib, the Stockholm-based platform for music producers to legally and easily sample other songs, rasied $4.5M from Sony Innovation Fund. (Read more)
   
• The US music publishing market totaled $3.72B in 2019, up 11.6% yoy. It’s a stat that speaks to the growth investors like Hipgnosis, Shamrock, Kobalt Capital, and Round Hill have bet on with they aggressive buying up of publishing rights to hit songs the last few years. (Read more)
  • The US recording music industry was $7.3B in 2019, by comparison.
     
• The Norwegian government approved a data fraud investigation into streaming service Tidal. (Read more)

Podcasting/Audio

• Headspace, the subscription audio app for meditation and sleep, raised $47.7M in new funding. (Read more)
   
• Podyssey’s Podcast Deep Dives (Read more)

Interactive Media

Gaming

• AT&T is looking to selling Warner Bros Interactive, its gaming unit, for $2-4B. (Read more)
  • “Take-Two Interactive, Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard have all expressed interest” says CNBC
     
• Snap says 100M users have played a game on Snapchat since games launched in April 2019. (Read more)
   
• Kahoot!, the Oslo-based platform for user-generated educational games, raised $28M via private placement from existing VC backer Northzone. Another $62M in shares were sold in a secondaries transaction. (Read more)
  • Kahoot! is listed on Norway’s Merkur, a sort of partially public market, with a full IPO expected in 2021.
  • Current market cap: $1.4B // 2020 predicted revenue: $32-38M
     
• Playable Worlds, a San Diego-based studio building a cloud-native sandbox MMO, raised $10M in Series A funding from Galaxy Interactive and Bitkraft Esports Ventures. (Read more)
   
• A testing prototype of Ubisoft‘s forthcoming open-world game Gods and Monsters accidentally appeared for download on Google Stadia. (Read more)
   
• Playstation showcased its new Playstation 5 console, which will release around the holidays at the same time the Xbox Series X console launches. (Read more)
  • WaPo had a good post comparing the companies’ strategies. PS is playing a traditional game, focused on a slate of expansive games developed in-house, whereas Xbox is focused on breadth by expanding its subscription service.
     
• Niantic, the studio behind Pokemon Go and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, has 10 games in development with a plan to release 2 new games per year. (Read more)
   
• EA announced a new Star Wars game called Star Wars: Squadrons. (Read more)
   
• Cloud Imperium Games, a West Hollywood-based game studio, surpassed $300M in crowdfunding for its Star Citizen. (Read more)
  • Star Citizen has been in development since 2011 and has had its public launch repeatedly delayed since 2014. Following an initial $2M Kickstarter in 2013, the team has continued to fundraise by pre-selling packages of digital goods that players will be able to use in the game. It hit $65M in 2014 and $200M in 2018.
  • There is no official release date for the game.
  • Here’s a Forbes story on the company a year ago.
     
• GamesBeat interview with Andrew Chen, the partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz who leads gaming investments: Read it here

Someone asked me to clarify two terms I use near-daily in this gaming section: “open-world” means there is an expansive virtual world your character can wander around and do things in as you feel like…you’re not forced to stick strictly to certain missions in certain places. A “sandbox” game is a subset of that in which your character is specifically building and changing the virtual world…think Minecraft or Roblox.

AR/VR

• Snap now enables third-party developers who create augmented reality Snapchat filters via the Lens Studio tool to upload their own machine learning models. (Read more)

Communications

• Snap introduced Snap Minis, a way for third-parties to make small HTML5 apps that can be pulled up within Snapchat messaging. (Read more)
  • Featured apps include buying concert tickets through Atom and creating flashcards with Tembo.
     
• Ethyca, a startup for managing data privacy compliance, raised $13.5M in Series A funding. IA Ventures led the deal, alongside a long list of angel investors including Mike Ovitz. (Read more)
   
• Reliance Jio sold more shares in its Reliance Jio Platforms division that is the largest mobile carrier in India, this time to PE firms TPG ($600M) and L Catterton. (Read more)
  • It totals nearly $14B in deals (for 22% combined stake) in the last month with Facebook, Silver Lake, KKR, Vista Equity Partners, General Atlantic, Mubadala, and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

Digestible Media

Film/TV/Video 

• TV networks and SVOD services in the US are removing content that is seen as glorifying police violence (like COPS) or portraying slavery or racism in a positive like (like Gone With The Wind).

Publishing

• Facebook launched its dedicated news section of the Facebook app, called Facebook News, for all US users today. (Read more)
   
• NewsKKR informed the board of publishing giant Axel Springer that it plans to force of buy-out of remaining shareholders as part of its take-private of the company. (Read more – in German)
   
• Tucker Carlson, who hosts a primetime show on Fox News, sold his ~33% stake in The Daily Caller, the American conservative news site he co-founded, to his co-founder Neil Patel. (Read more)
   
• Digiday did a case study on how Bloomberg Media is reducing its subscriber churn rate. (Read more)

Music

• Wave, a startup whose platform hosts concerts within virtual worlds, raised $30M in Series B funding from Maveron, Griffin Gaming Partners, RRE Ventures, Upfront, Scooter Braun, and Alex Rodriguez. (Read more)
   
• Warner Music shares remain stable after the music group’s IPO last week. It’s currently trading around $31/share ($16B market cap), having started trading at $27 and finished its first day at $29

Podcasting/Audio

• Podhero launched as a podcast streaming app where users pay a $4.99 per month subscription, which is them divided among their favorite podcasts (at percentages they can set). (Read more)
  • This is from the creators of the podcast discover app Swoot.
  • Money allocated to podcast creators who haven’t created a Podhero account will remain available for them to claim whenever they sign up in the future.

Interactive Media

Gaming

• Unity, the game engine, has long been criticized for being quick to release new updates that are then buggy for many months, frustrating developers.
  • It announced it will now make the default Unity license a long-term supported (LTS) version which comes out annually and is supported for two years. (Read more)
  • Users who still want to frequent stream of new updates can opt into that but for most users those new features will just release as part of the next LTS version (after most bugs have been solved).
     
• Sensor Tower released data on the top grossing mobile games for the month of May. (Read more)
  Of note:
  • #1 PUBG, $226 million
  • #2 Honor of Kings, $204 million
  • #7 Pokemon Go, $82 million
     
• Sales of legally-bought game consoles are growing substantially in China, which has traditionally been much more of a PC and mobile market and where most consoles have typically been acquired through the gray market (consoles manufactured at Chinese factories for other markets but sold domestically under the table). (Read more)

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Digestible Media

Film/TV/Video 

• Boom.tv — whose live-streaming platform targets small, amateur esports tournament — raised $10M in Series A funding from Bitkraft Esports Ventures, Crest Capital, and Pole To Win. (Read more)
   
• Movie theaters in California are set to reopen (at 25% capacity) on June 12.

Publishing

• Digiday reports that US and European publishers are bracing for a second wave of layoffs. (Read more)
   
• Vogue profiled Roula Khalaf, new editor of the Financial Times. (Read more)

Music

• Kiswe Mobile, a high-end event live-streaming platform based in New Jersey, announced a broad partnership with Big Hit Entertainment, the record label behind K-Pop group BTS. (Read more)
   
• SiriusXM announced a $1.5B debt offering (4.125% Senior Notes due 2030). (Read more)

Interactive Media

Gaming

• Twitch is receiving a massive surge of legal takedown requests for clips that contain background music, going back through 2017. It caught Twitch and Twitch users off guard, with numerous popular accounts now threatened with permanent bans based on Twitch’s 3-strike rule. (Read more)
  • Twitch is trying to work with creators through the problem, but appears to also be advising many to delete their entire catalog of past videos.
  • Twitch doesn’t offer a way to bulk delete videos, forcing creators to delete videos one by one. (Many creators have thousands of clips.)
     
• Kalypso Media Group, the Germany-based game publisher, acquired the remaining 40% of Gaming Minds Studios (creator of Railway Empire) it didn’t already own. (Read more)

Communications

• Reliance Jio Platforms sold a 1.16% stake to Abu Dhabi Investment Authority for $750M. It’s the latest in a wave of new investors in India’s top mobile carrier, following deals with Facebook, Silver Lake, KKR, and Mubdala. (Read more)
   
• The US Senate‘s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a bipartisan report warning the US government to do more to block Chinese influence over US telecom infrastructure. (Read it here)

Hi everyone – a very quiet Friday for media deals today. Take care this weekend!

Interesting Deals, Stats, & Product Updates

Digestible Media

Film/TV/Video 

• Mediaset, the Italian TV giant, is demanding Germany’s ProSiebenSat.1 commit to a plan to grow its core TV business at next week’s shareholder meeting. (Read more)
  • ProSieben spent the last several years focused on developing its Nucom holdings in e-commerce and consumer apps. With a change in CEO in March after weak financial performance, the company stated a return to focusing on its core entertainment business.
  • Mediaset, which has built just under a 25% stake in ProSieben, has become an outspoken critic of the company not acting aggressively enough. 
  • Here’s a blog post by one investor predicting Mediaset and KKR (the PE firm that co-owned Prosieben from 2006 to 2013 and just bought a 5% stake in it again) will team up to takeover Prosieben, and sell the Nucom division to Axel Springer (the German publishing conglomerate KKR just took private). There’s big question of whether German regulators would allow that though.
     
• Disney is including Hulu in its pitch to TV advertisers at the upfronts this year. It’s also touting a new ad platform Disney Hulu XP that allows brands to make one purchase of advertising across all of Disney’s digital properties. (Read more)

Publishing

• Bytedance is shutting down TopBuzz, the international version of its enormously popular Jinri Toutiao social news aggregation app in China. TopBuzz once reached 40M MAUs but faded over the last several years. (Read more)

Interactive Media

Gaming

• Play One Up raised $3.1 million in seed funds from Three Curve Capital. The Ohio-based startup enables gamers to make wagers on the outcomes of their games within Madden NFL, NBA2K, FIFA, Fortnite, etc. and takes a 15% fee. (Read more)

Communications

• Reliance Jio Platforms, India’s leading telecom (in which both Facebook and KKR made large investments last month), is selling a 1.85% stake to UAE sovereign fund Mubadala for $1.2 billion. (Read more)

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Hi everyone – I got a late start today, so pardon the nighttime newsletter.

I enjoyed this NYT profile of Zane Lowe, Apple Music’s Global Creative Director. He is one of the best interviewers in all of media, in my opinion. His long-form interviews make you feel like you’re a fly on the wall as two friends have a deep, honest conversation about how and why the artist crafted each song and where they are mentally in life right now.

Recommended Read: Supercell analysis
I came across this strong, detailed analysis of Supercell by the hosts of the Deconstructors of Fun podcast, outlining the mechanics of Supercell’s games, the company’s growth strategy, and their recommendations on how to gain new momentum since new releases over the last 3 years haven’t overcome declining popularity in the overall portfolio.

Supercell is the gold standard of mobile games studios. All 5 of its games — Hay Day, Clash of Clans, Boom Beach, Clash Royale, and Brawl Stars — rank among the highest grossing mobile games of all time.

The Helsinki-based, Tencent-owned company employs just 320 people with annual revenue of ~$1.6B and pre-tax profits of $600M. (Fun fact: 2016 data showed 7 of the 10 highest paid people in Finland were Supercell employees).

Read their post

Interesting Deals, Stats, & Product Updates

Digestible Media

Film/TV/Video 

• Quibi is implementing 10% pay cuts for executives. It denies a WSJ report that its planning layoffs. (Read more)

Publishing

• DAZN Group, the company behind the sports-focused SVOD platform DAZN, is reportedly selling the soccer news website Goal.com to TPG for around $125M. (Read more)
  • DAZN has been in need of money with sports shut down, and given its hefty losses even before Covid-19 as it bought up streaming rights from sports leagues.
  • DAZN is owned by Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries, which yesterday cashed in $1.9B of its controlling stake in Warner Media via IPO.
     
• Facebook announced it is prohibiting state-owned media companies from advertising on its platforms in the US. It will also label their posts as state media. (Read more)
  • It’s a positive step in helping users recognize propoganda, albeit a small dent in the much larger ecosystem of bots and unofficial state propoganda.
  • Defining which outlets count for this is a big grey area. Arguably any media outlet based in an authoritarian country that censors and threatens media is acting as an arm of the state even if they aren’t owned by the state.
     
• Medium launched a Newsletters feature for those with publications on Medium. Potential subscribers have to create a Medium account in order to subscribe to your newsletter, however, and — based on my creation of a newsletter to test this — doesn’t seem to give you access to your subscribers’ email addresses. Avoid this feature. (Read more)

Podcasting/Audio

• Edison Research released its annual Infinite Dial Canada report, with survey results tracking market growth and market shares in Canada for smart speakers, podcasting, music streaming, and radio. (Read more)

Interactive Media

Gaming

• Survey results: percent of kids age 4-14 in the US and UK who play Roblox (🇺🇸 54%, 🇬🇧 51%) and Minecraft (🇺🇸 31%, 🇬🇧 23%). (Read more)
   
• Playrix, a Dublin-based mobile and PC studio behind Gardenscapes, is acquiring the Croatian point-and-click adventure PC games studio Cateia Games. Cateia’s 40-person team will rebrand as Playrix Croatia. (Read more)
   
• Rovio acquired mobile studio Darkfire Games for an undisclosed price and is rebranding it Rovio Copenhagen. (Read more)
   
• Unity Technologies, the most-used game engine in the world (and one of two that dominate the market, alongside Epic Games’ Unreal Engine), has reportedly hired Goldman Sachs to prep an IPO for late this year. (Read more)
  • I spent a lot of time with Unity’s exec team and founders last year. Here’s my article about the rise of the company: How Unity built the world’s most popular game engine 
  • In Q1 2019 there were reports that Unity was targeting a Q1 2020 IPO. It raised more private funding instead, and may have been delayed by a sexual harassment lawsuit in the summer.
  • Unity dominates in mobile games and AR/VR, Unreal is more popular in console & PC. Both are expanding into 3D design use cases in architecture, engineering, auto design, and Hollywood virtual production.
     
• Epic Games signed a deal with Sega and The Creative Assembly to release A Total War Saga: Troy exclusively through the Epic Games Store for the first year. (Read more)
  • A Total War Saga: Troy is the latest offshoot of the popular Total War franchise.
  • Unusual strategy: the game will be free for the first 24 hours, meaning anyone who downloads it then can keep it forever without paying.
     
• Two shareholder advisory firms recommended pension funds vote against Activision Blizzard‘s proposed executive compensation scheme, criticizing CEO Bobby Kotick’s bonus structure and overall comp relative to performance. (Read more)

Communications

• Amazon is reportedly in talks with Bharti Airtel, the 3rd largest telecom in India, about purchasing a 5% stake (for around $2B). (Read more)
  • It follows Facebook’s investment in Reliance Jio Platforms to challenge Amazon’s e-commerce efforts in India, and Google’s reported investment talks with Vodafone Idea (the 2nd largest telecom).
     
• Twitter usage is soaring in the US during nationwide protests. (Read more)

Dealmakers

• Paradigm (the fourth largest Hollywood talent agency after WME-IMG, CAA, and UTA) took on additional investment from Crescent Drive Media, which is owned by Platinum Equity founder Tom Gores (aka brother of Paradigm CEO Sam Gores). (Read more)
  • All the agencies have been suffering serious financial losses due to the Covid-19 lockdown halting sports leagues, Hollywood productions, and concerts.
     
• Forbes released its annual list of highest paid celebrities, although its lacking in methodology. It seems to go by top-line revenue for concerts etc. so the earnings of the celebrity as a brand not as an individual. (Here’s the list)

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Hi everyone – FYI as a correction from yesterday, Czech console/PC gaming company Bohemia Interactive is disputing a widely cited report by The Information that Tencent is acquiring a majority stake in it.

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Update on violence against media in the US
Bellingcat investigative reporter Nick Waters is tracking verified incidents of arrests/assaults on journalists by police at protests in the US, currently at 138 incidents. (Track it here.)

The Freedom of Press Foundation is maintaining a public spreadsheet tracking the details of arrests and assaults on journalists by police or protesters in the US. Its count is now at 233 incidents. (Track it here.)

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Interesting Deals, Stats, & Product Updates

Digestible Media

Film/TV/Video 

• AMC Entertainment: “…substantial doubt exists about our ability to continue as a going concern for a reasonable period of time.” (Read more)
   
• Orca Studios opened a 600 sq meter sound stage with LED walls for virtual production of film/TV using game engines. The Spanish company built the studio in the Canary Islands. (Read more)

Publishing

• The Athletic and the Bleacher Report (both sports-focused news publishers) are reportedly exploring partnerships with sports betting sites. (Read more)
  • The Information reports that The Action Network — a publisher focused on sports betting content that was incubated by The Chernin Group — gets affiliate fees of $250-400 per person (or up to a 30% rev share) for users it refers to 11 betting sites it has partnered with.

Music

• Warner Music Group listed on Nasdaq this morning under the ticker WMG. It priced shares at $25.00, opened at $27.00 (a $13.77B market cap), and closed at $29.92. (Read more)
   
• Facebook signed a global licensing deal with Indian music label Saregama India, permitting Facebook and Instagram users to include 100,000 of the labels songs in their posts. (Read more)
   
• JioSaavn, the popular music stream app in India that’s owned by Reliance Jio, released a full app redesign, including the ability for artists to add 15-second looping videos to accompany their songs. (Read more)

Podcasting/Audio

• Apple is beta testing audio versions of news stories within its Apple News+ app. (Read more)

Interactive Media

Gaming

• Playtika is prepping for an IPO with goals of raising $1B at a $10B valuation, according to the NYT. The Israeli mobile games giant with 27M MAUs recently acquired Seriously and is owned a group of Chinese investors that includes Netmarble, Jack Ma and Hony Capital. Morgan Stanley is underwriting. (Read more)
   
• DoubleDown Interactive, a Korea- and Seattle-based publisher of social casino games, filed for a $100M IPO on Nasdaq. Its 2019 revenue was $273m with $36m in net income. JP Morgan is underwriting. (Read more | F-1 Filing)
   
• Nexon, the South Korean game publisher with over 60 games worldwide, announced it plans to invest $1.5B in other publicly-listed entertainment companies. (Read more)
  • Nexon shares are up 60% thus far this year. It had $770M in Q1 revenue.
     
• Paradox Interactive, the Stockholm-based maker of grand strategy PC games, signed a collective bargaining agreement following employees’ unionization efforts. (Read more)

AR/VR

• Oculus added hand-tracking compatibility for developers using Unreal Engine. Since Oculus released hand-tracking (using your hands rather than a controller to move and click things in VR) in late 2019, it’s only been added to the Unity integration. (Read more)

Communications

• Zigazoo, a new app for parents and young kids in which kids respond to short video-based exercises, surpassed 100,000 video uploads in its first month. (Read more)
   
• TikTok issues an apology to black creators who have been accusing the social video app of “shadow banning” posts related to protests and Black Lives Matter so they don’t appear in other users’ feeds. TikTok says it was a technical glitch that affected a lot fo different hashtags. (Read more)
  • Last year, investigations by The Guardian found TikTok systematically hides content related to Hong Kong, LGBT advocacy, and criticism of certain governments.
     
• Google pulled the app Remove China Apps from its Play Store. The app, which informs users about which apps on their phone are created by Chinese companies, has been blowing up in India with 5+ million downloads in 2 weeks amid India-China political tensions. (Read more)

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Hi everyone – just a few quick points today. Lots of companies have delayed planned announcements while protests continue in the US so expect deal news this week to be even quieter than it normally is during your typical global pandemic.

The EU launched submission forms to receive public input on its Digital Services Act governing online media and on the extent to which new competition / anti-trust policies are needed. (Read more)

Interesting Deals, Stats, & Product Updates

Digestible Media

Film/TV/Video 

• Here’s a great read by Business Insider on the inside story of YouTube’s 2006 sale to Google, and why it was finalized at 3am in a Denny’s park lot with a police officer.
   
• TF1 and Mediapro, leading TV broadcasters in France and Spain respectively, announced a new soccer-focused TV channel called Telefoot. (Read more)
  • The JV will broadcast Ligue 1 games in France since Mediapro beat out Canal Plus for the rights to the French league’s next 4 seasons.
  • Telefoot will launch in August with €25/month pricing and has a goal of 3.5m subscribers.
     
• The Weather Channel joined the OpenAP consortium of TV networks offering advertisers the ability to target ads across their channels based on different categories of purchasing intent not just demographics. (Read more)
   
• California delayed release of guidelines for film/TV productions to continue again after opposition by Hollywood unions demanding more safety precautions be taken first. (Read more)

Publishing

• Shamrock Capital acquired advertising industry trade publication Adweek from Beringer Capital (Read more)
   
• The Washington Post signed US newspaper group McClatchy as a customer for its Zeus Performance adtech platform, adding McClatchy’s 30 local news brands. (Read more)
   
• Civil, the once-hyped “blockchain for news” startup is shutting down. (Read more)

Music

• Most US music companies are participating in “Blackout Tuesday” today, with periods of silence in their programming to acknowledge protests and/or by giving employees the day off to participate in protests if desired.

Podcasting/Audio

• Majelan, a Paris-based subscription podcast platform that raised €10M, is pivoting to instead be a subscription app of audio content related to personal growth. (Read more)
  • The space of subscription, audio self-help apps is getting crowded, with a lot of startups chasing the success of Calm, Headspace, and Blinkist with slightly different iterations.

Interactive Media

Gaming

• Tencent is buying a majority (70-80%) stake in Bohemia Interactive for $260M. Bohemia is the Czech studio behind PC and console games Ylands and DayZ. (Read more)
   
• A survey by Interpret shows that YouTube is not the #1 way US children age 3-12 discover new mobile games, with 49% doing so. (Read more)

(This was originally published within today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.)

Zynga’s $1.8 billion acquisition of Peak Games
Zynga is buying Peak Games, the Istanbul-based mobile games studio that has 12 million DAUs across puzzle games Toon Blast and Toy Blast, for $1.8B in a half-cash, half-stock deal. (Read more)

Peak raised less than $25M from outside investors, making this a big financial outcome for Peak CEO Sidar Sahin and the other founders and early investors. The studio’s first investor, London-based Hummingbird Ventures, invested €500k at a €2M pre-money valuation in 2010; in a blog post, it says this acquisition alone provides an 8.6x return on their entire fund. German firm Earlybird Ventures — which led Peak’s Series A, B, and C rounds — claims a $520M return.

Zynga acquired Peak’s mobile card game business (Spades Plus, Gin Rummy Plus, Okey Plus, and 101 Okey Plus) in 2017 for $100M. Zynga rose during 2009-2013 as the leading social games company but then saw gamers move on from the category. It gradually regained footing as a leading mobile game publisher, largely via M&A or smaller, fast-growing studios. via an M&A centric strategy. Zynga says the acquisition will increase Q2 revenue projections from $460M to $500M.

This is a case study of the favorable investor dynamics with game studios: successful games are quickly profitable and the studio can grow substantially without further funding rounds that heavily dilute the early shareholders (founding team + investors). It also highlights the geographic spread of where leading gaming startups are based, with Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and Latin America birthing large studios and attracting foreign investors.

Interesting Deals, Stats, & Product Updates

Digestible Media

Film/TV/Video 

• NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell is exploring the idea of re-focusing CNBC‘s evening programming (think Shark Tank and The Profit) on conservative political talk shows, according to NYT media columnist Ben Smith. (Read more)
  • This is already the territory of Fox News and Fox Business, but perhaps Shell sees market share to capture just by entering a less crowded field where Fox is soaking up profits.
  • It comes as Sinclair Broadcasting, a leading group of US local TV channels, has been exploring its own 24/7 cable network and as President Trump has been promoting a new Southern California-based network, OAN.
     
• Facebook‘s IGTV app has finally added ads and a rev-share split of 55% for creators two years after it launched, but it won’t be enabling media companies to participate until the start of next year. (Read more)
   
• Netflix bought the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles, giving it a dedicated venue to premier its original films. American Cinematheque, the non-profit that owned the iconic theatre until now, will continue to program much of the venue’s schedule. (Read more)
   
• Cheddar is consolidating its two OTT TV channels into one that features a mix of both business and cultural/political news. (Read more)
   
• WWE is launching a free tier to its OTT network. (Read more)

Publishing

• This year’s schedule of book releases have all been pushed into the fall, making it hard for authors to stand out from the marketing noise. (Read more)
   
• While many news publishers are making layoffs and salary cuts, leading subscription news brands like the NYT and WSJ are actively hiring and expanding. (Read more)

Music

• Infographic on how Covid-19 lockdown affects different parts of the music industry: (See here)

Interactive Media

Gaming

• Netease, the Chinese gaming giant that has traded on Nasdaq for two decades, is also listing on the Hong Kong exchange this week, selling $3B in shares. (Read more)
   
• Paradox, the Stockholm-based creator of grand strategy games like Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron, is opening a Barcelona studio to lead development of Europa Universalis IV. (Read more)

Communications

• Facebook‘s R&D team released Venue, an app oriented around discussion of live events. (Read more)
   
• Slow Ventures’ Sam Lessin outlines both reasons the new social audio app Clubhouse could be the next big thing and why specific product decisions could inhibit it from success. (Read it here)
   
• PE firms Providence, KKR, and Cinven are making a joint bid for a majority stake in Spain’s 4th largest telecom, MasMovil, valuing it at €3B (or €5B including debt). (Read more)
  • MasMovil has been a fast growing new entrant in the market, rolling up smaller companies and securing market share of 14% in mobile and 11% in broadband.