Week 15 was dominated by Walt Disney's investor day, which focused on the company's direct-to-consumer strategy. Schibsted completed the Adevinta spin-off. The Telecompaper Stock Index Global Consumer Media ended the week up 1.7 percent, outperforming the S&P 500 (+0.5%). Performances ranged between +13 percent for Walt Disney and -13 percent for McClatchy.
Disney+ vs. Netflix
Walt Disney's investor day centered on the upcoming Disney+ service, but also updated on the other streaming services it already has out there, including ESPN+, Hulu (still counting AT&T (-0.5%) and Comcast (+2.2%) as its minority shareholders) and Hotstar (Asia). Netflix (-3.9%) suffered from the upbeat presentation of Disney+, priced montly at just USD 7, whereas Netflix was in fact raising its prices in parts of Europe. The company was also in talks to buy a classic Hollywood movie theatre.
Facebook and Google under fire
Facebook (+1.9%) came under fire for several privacy-related issues. Alphabet's (+0.9%) Google hosted its Cloud Next conference and Google's YouTube raised the monthly price for its OTT-TV service YouTube TV, available nationwide in the US.
Axel Springer (+3.1%) was active on the legal front. Its Idealo unit sued Google for alleged abuse of market power and Springer sued a provider of ad-blocker software on grounds of copyright infringement.
Prisa (+0.6%) was ordered to pay a EUR 51 million fine in a longrunning dispute over football rights.
M&A
The Norwegian publisher Schibsted completed the spin-off of its international classifieds business Adevinta. The latter could be an obvious candidate to take over eBay's classifieds unit, which was put up for sale recently. Schibsted lost 28 percent of its market value, but corrected for the spin-off both shares gained 0.1 percent.
Publicis (+1.4%) acquired the American digital agency Epsilon for USD 3.95 billion. The company also launched a sports agency. Naspers (+3.1%), through its fintech unit PayU, bought Wimbo. There were rumours of ProSieben (-3.5%) and Mediaset (-1.5%) being in merger talks, but they were quick to deny. AT&T, according to press reports, would be looking into selling HBO Europe, but also denied.
