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New York Post
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Post
It's not just Colbert — network late-night TV is dead
Everybody was shocked — shocked! — when Stephen Colbert announced this week that CBS canceled 'The Late Show.' The despondent media reacted like a meteor was about to smash into Earth. But how surprising was Colbert's kibosh really? Advertisement Did peoples' jaws also hit the floor when Blockbuster Video called it quits in 2014? Were they muffling their screams when blimps were phased out for air travel in 1937? 'What do you mean 'no more silent films'?!' Advertisement The end of 'The Late Show' was every bit as writ-in-stone as any of those predictable downfalls. And it's not only Colbert. The Grim Reaper is coming for all of late-night TV. Those comedians in neckties are just ignoring Death's deafening knock. The retro programs, which began in the 1950s as an experiment to fill time, have far too tiny a viewership to justify their exorbitant cost anymore. The Post reported Friday that Colbert's talk show was losing $40 to $50 million per year. The Times watered down those figures to mere 'tens of millions.' Advertisement Awfully hard to blame Trump for that. 4 Colbert's show was reportedly losing $40-50 million a year. CBS via Getty Images True, 'The Late Show' was beating the competition with 2.42 million nightly viewers on average during the first quarter. But just 9% of those eyeballs were in the 18-49 demo that advertisers covet. That means no ad dollars because young people couldn't care less. Advertisement And why would they? They've got YouTube and TikTok to scroll through after dark. 4 'The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon' likely won't be too far behind. Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images The funniest story of the week by a mile was Astronomer CEO Andy Byron getting caught on the jumbotron kiss cam canoodling with his head of HR at a Coldplay concert. I even chuckled as I typed it. Fifteen years ago, Americans would've turned to David Letterman and Conan O'Brien to mock the horny halfwits. Now, social media does it faster and funnier than Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers ever could. Shake up the format all you want, but a fixed 11:30 p.m. show with commercial breaks on a dusty, old, censored network can't compete with instant, razor-sharp reactions from billions. Advertisement Could chats with A-List stars keep the struggling shows afloat? Hah. The five-minute, skim-the-surface interview is a thing of the past, too. Celebrities are way overexposed, and promotional appearances present them at their fakest and least likable. That's why podcasts like 'Good Hang with Amy Poehler' and 'Las Culturistas' with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, which can be listened to for free at any time of day, are so popular. They give you a casual, revealing full hour with big names. Sensing the sea change, top talent keeps choosing headphones over TV sets. Advertisement 4 Escalating politics have been just one problem for late-night TV. CBS via Getty Images The escalating politics of late night are often called out as the chief offender. And they were a thorn, to be sure. But their slant is not the No. 1 problem anymore. Think about it. Gen Z and Millennials aren't steering clear of talk shows because the hosts are too left-leaning. The simple truth is these monologue-couch-desk affairs are behind-the-times museum exhibits that today's audience has a dwindling connection to. Advertisement 'The Late Late Show with James Corden' was the first major casualty. Now, the guillotine has dropped on CBS' former crown jewel. NBC's 'The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,' 'Late Night with Seth Meyers' and 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' won't be far behind. Yes, I know the politically driven cable shows like 'The Daily Show' and 'Gutfeld' are chugging along. They're different animals. Undeniably, the network workhorses that were once for everybody are now for nobody. 4 The biggest story from late-night TV this week was about a 16-year-old interview conducted by David Letterman. CBS via Getty Images Advertisement It's telling that, aside from Colbert's walking papers, just one big-ish story has come out of late-night TV all month. That was cuckoo Joaquin Phoenix apologizing for his uncomfortable stunt interview with David Letterman, the first 'Late Show' host, back in 2009. It's a reminder of how vital late-night TV used to be. A 16-year-old interaction with a totally different man is still a hotter topic than anything the new guys can drum up. I'd suggest Letterman return for a 'Top 10 Reasons Late-night Shows Are Disappearing' list. But he'd only need one. Nobody's watching them.
Bloomberg
03-06-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Marathon's Richards Raises Caution on Direct Lending to Software Firms
Handing out private loans to software technology companies is not 'intelligent,' said Marathon Asset Management Chief Executive Officer and founder Bruce Richards, cautioning firms that can't make the artificial-intelligence transition will have a 'Blockbuster Video moment.' 'This is one sector that really causing me to take a lot of pause,' Richards said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Tuesday. 'I think it's a great place to invest as private equity, but not such an intelligent place to invest if you are private credit capped at par on the software companies.'
Yahoo
01-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's damage will take a generation to repair, but deaths can't be undone
The damage Donald Trump has done to our 'Experiment in Democracy' will take a generation to repair. The damage he has inflicted on the health of Americans and people worldwide is criminal. In his first term, he politicized COVID. This extended the pandemic, leading to more deaths. The indiscriminate cuts to staff and funding of federal agencies and universities will hinder research on cancer cures, vaccinations and will stop life-saving experimental treatments. The best scientists will not want to work in this country. Canceling USAID, our most effective foreign aid, will be devastating. It will stop the children vaccinations in poor countries and treating epidemics worldwide before they can come to this country. It is unacceptable for pregnant women and children to contract preventable illness! David Nachamie, MD, Lincolnton For nine years, I served as a custody advocate with Council for Children's Rights (CFCR) — an organization that was a lifeline for vulnerable children and families in our courts. We conducted in-depth investigations: Are these children being abused? Are they eating? Are they being silenced? CFCR is closing one of its most important departments. It is heartbreaking and shameful. This department provided some of the best legal support and advocacy regardless of income or status. We served every child as if they were our own. When judges had no answers, we found them. Shame on us for not fighting harder. Shame on the silence that followed the tireless work of unpaid advocates who protected the voiceless. Who will take up this work and speak for these children? When we let this department fall, we abandoned those who needed us most. Melanie Dunston, Charlotte North Carolina just got left in the solar dust. With the U.S. House's budget scrapping clean energy tax credits, we're waving goodbye to billions in investment and thousands of good paying jobs. N.C. was building a reputation as a clean energy powerhouse. Now, we risk becoming the Blockbuster Video of energy innovation. This isn't just bad policy — it's economic self-sabotage. Farmers leasing land for solar, techs installing panels and engineers building wind grids all stand to lose. The planet doesn't get a do-over. Let's not pull the plug on progress. We need a budget that backs clean energy. The Big Beautiful Bill is only Big. Lost NC jobs and investments are not beautiful — neither is a dirtier climate. Jane Taylor, Charlotte The U.S. credit rating for its mounting debt got lowered while the president and the Republican Party push for reduced tax rates for the wealthiest Americans. Only in America! Tom Bowers, Charlotte Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) deserves praise for its flawless execution of free spectator transportation from its I-485/Sharon Rd station to the PGA Championship. My experience to and from Quail Hollow was short wait times, very clean transportation and friendly staff. Thank you to CATS staff and leadership who made this service seamless and pleasant. Mark Doby, Salisbury Trump's trade games create less security for businesses and citizens. Trump calls his 'Art of the deal' trade negotiations 'brilliant,' but the brilliance of our economy is in question with his whiplash approach. Listening to small to mid-size business owners and CEOs, it sounds like they are having huge problems pricing products and communicating with customers about pricing. This can lead to far less profit, layoffs, and even bankruptcies. Just not knowing if a tariff is off or on makes planning difficult. Customers of all kinds of business to business products and business to consumer products are stocking up ahead of tariffs or keeping their powder dry until they can see a way ahead that has certainty. This is a system of capitalism, and it seems Trump is unaware of the pain his whiplash approach is inflicting. Katherine Nelson, Rock Hill
CNBC
15-05-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Using options to trade the sell-off in UnitedHealth shares
The Fortune 500 index ranks the 500 largest companies in the nation by revenue. Third on the list, trailing only Walmart and Amazon, is the nation's largest health insurer, UnitedHealth. The company has had a tough go of it recently. Late last year, the CEO of the company's UnitedHealth subsidiary was shot and killed just as he was entering the Hilton in Midtown to present at a conference. The company missed earnings and reduced guidance in April. On Tuesday, the CEO resigned "for personal reasons," the company suspended guidance only a month after reducing it. The average of analysts' 12-month price targets, over $640 per share earlier this year, has fallen more than 30% to $438. Then, after the close on Wednesday, the fire responsible for all that smoke was revealed when The Wall Street Journal reported a criminal investigation for possible Medicare fraud by the Department of Justice. The stock fell another 15% on Thursday, making it the worst-performing stock in the S & P 500 this year. When a company with a long and successful track record falters this severely, we have to ask ourselves questions to help establish whether the crisis is existential, persistent, prolonged or temporary: Is a secular shift in the industry threatening the business? Think Blockbuster Video before Netflix entered the picture—existential. Was there an unusually strong cycle that is unlikely to repeat? A "pig in a python" scenario — think Pfizer and Moderna with Covid vaccines — persistent/prolonged. Was the company fraudulently cooking the books? Think Enron or Worldcom —existential. Was the company creatively "massaging" its financials with creative accounting? Consider General Electric during the Jack Welch/Jeff Immelt era —persistent/prolonged. Is this a valuation issue where the price and the fundamentals are diverging? Think of Amazon in the late 1990s and early aughts. The stock price fell 95%, peak to trough, while revenues doubled–temporary. Is the company facing massive legal or regulatory problems that will significantly impair the business? Think tobacco, PG & E or Boeing — persistent/prolonged. More bad news is possible. The company insists it has done nothing wrong and said the DOJ had not notified it of the reported investigation. While executives insisted on a conference call Tuesday that they intend and expect to get back to prior margins and growth targets, it seems unlikely all this damage can be erased in the near term, and options prices, already elevated on hefty volume this week, are likely to rise even further now. Uncertainty caused a sharp drop in the stock price, a spike in options prices. A possible criminal investigation compound the hazards facing contrarians looking to pick up a once great company on the cheap. It's always tricky to try and catch a falling knife. But as the two charts above reveal, 1) a 4% net income margin is a conservative baseline assumption, and 2) the only times UNH has traded much cheaper than it is right now were in the 1999/2000 time frame and during the great financial crisis. Could the stock fall to those multiples again or even lower? Of course, it shows how depressed the stock price is now. One way to take advantage of the depressed stock price combined with well-above-average options premiums is to perform a call/spread risk reversal, as follows. However, remember that this is a speculative long-term bet. The trade: Buy 1 June 27 $265 call Sell 1 June 27 $300 call Sell 1 June 27 $240 put Incidentally, if you own the stock and want a little kicker to upside without adding to downside risk, consider overlaying your long stock with zero-cost 1x2 call spreads. DISCLOSURES: All opinions expressed by the CNBC Pro contributors are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of CNBC, NBC UNIVERSAL, their parent company or affiliates, and may have been previously disseminated by them on television, radio, internet or another medium. THE ABOVE CONTENT IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY . THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND DOES NOT CONSITUTE FINANCIAL, INVESTMENT, TAX OR LEGAL ADVICE OR A RECOMMENDATION TO BUY ANY SECURITY OR OTHER FINANCIAL ASSET. THE CONTENT IS GENERAL IN NATURE AND DOES NOT REFLECT ANY INDIVIDUAL'S UNIQUE PERSONAL CIRCUMSTANCES. THE ABOVE CONTENT MIGHT NOT BE SUITABLE FOR YOUR PARTICULAR CIRCUMSTANCES. BEFORE MAKING ANY FINANCIAL DECISIONS, YOU SHOULD STRONGLY CONSIDER SEEKING ADVICE FROM YOUR OWN FINANCIAL OR INVESTMENT ADVISOR. Click here for the full disclaimer.
The Star
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
Netflix overhauls its home screen for the first time in 12 years
LOS GATOS, California: The most powerful home page in entertainment is about to look a lot different. Beginning next week, Netflix will introduce a new home page design for television screens, the company's first serious makeover since 2013. The redesign, which features fewer titles but more video and animation, is intended to present a sleeker look and get 'people to press play, and stay', the company said. The last time Netflix debuted a major home page redesign, the streaming service had just over 30 million subscribers and was only starting to make its own original programmes. It now has more than 300 million subscribers, has released thousands of original TV shows and movies and has remade the entire entertainment industry in its streaming image. It's a moment that the company is marketing as 'the new Netflix'. The new home page will have a navigation bar across the top of the screen, instead of being tucked away on the left side, as it has been. It will also feature what executives are calling 'responsive recommendations', which will serve titles on the home page based on what the subscriber has been searching for in near-real time. (Looking for horror? Here come a lot more horror recommendations.) And the new TV home page will have the ability to more prominently feature its new content types, like live programming. 'The real goal of this is, how do we make it easier, how do we make it simpler, faster for you to make a great decision?' Greg Peters, a co-CEO of the company, said in an interview. The redesign will start rolling out for all subscribers in the coming weeks and months. It will be only for television screens, which is where viewers do most of their Netflix viewing (70%, the company said). The implications for the industry could be significant. Over the past decade, nearly all media companies copied Netflix's TV home page when designing their own streaming services, with rows upon rows of titles. Now the gap between Netflix and the traditional entertainment industry is so vast that HBO and Max executives say they would be happy to be considered as an 'add-on' in households that already subscribe to Netflix. But at the same time, Netflix is locked in a battle for streaming TV time supremacy in the United States with YouTube. The Google-owned company has a fairly comfortable lead against Netflix, according to Nielsen, the research firm. Company executives said they started dreaming up the new home page – the internal nickname is Eclipse – in late 2022. Although Netflix's home page has been revised and updated several times over the past decade, executives said the company was beginning to hit a wall with the old design. For starters, there was just the look itself, with seemingly endless rows of titles and tiles, one that Steve Johnson, Netflix's vice president of design, likened to a Blockbuster Video shelf. Eunice Kim, Netflix's chief product officer, said, 'The way that the old home page is built, you kind of see box art, box art, box art, box art.' 'It's kind of suboptimal, right?' she added. Subscribers firing up their Netflix app, she said, have traditionally been divided into two branches: about half who know exactly what they want to watch versus another half who have sort of an idea, or no idea at all. Kim said, however, that the not-knowing-what-they-want group had increased in recent years. 'That just means our product needs to work even harder to kind of introduce these titles to folks for the first time,' she said. Enter Eclipse. Though the Netflix catalogue remains as big as ever, the new home page will display fewer titles. When a subscriber hovers over a title, however, it will expand into a much bigger image on the screen. That image will be packed with information, including a brief description and badges that will say things like 'highly rewatched', 'spent 13 weeks in the Top 10' or 'Oscar nominee'. After a couple of seconds, a preview video from the show or movie will then begin to play. (The company has found that people are more likely to watch a show or movie after seeing a clip.) The goal, Kim said, is 'getting you to kind of slow down and notice a little bit more about the title versus scanning'. Eclipse will also begin to quickly offer subscribers recommendations based on their searches, 'something we've been pursuing really for a couple of years now,' Peters said. If a subscriber is searching for family movies, for example, more and more real estate lower on the home screen will start to populate with family-friendly programming. On the old home page, it could take up to a day for the algorithm to catch up. 'In the same way that people might talk about a TikTok as being like, 'Oh, gosh, it really seems to understand me,' we want our members to be able to feel that way about our service, right – like we get them,' Kim said. Executives believe Eclipse will also drive viewers more urgently to live events like an NFL game, or a big fight. 'You see the livestream, and it's not just a piece of artwork, but you see the animation, the motion, the energy of the fight going on, right when you turn on the TV,' Kim said. Competitors seem eager to change up their home pages, too. Disney's CEO, Bob Iger, expressed some frustration with his company's streaming home pages in an earnings call this year, saying they had 'to be more dynamic' and lamenting that they were 'fairly static in nature'. Peters said that, with time, he hopes subscribers start to notice just how much better the new Netflix is. And then, he imagined, when they click over to their streaming competitors from Netflix, 'those other experiences feel relatively static, maybe they feel a little bit old at some point in time, and stuck in the mud,' he said. 'You know,' he continued, 'I wouldn't be sad about that outcome.' – ©2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
