CNN will collect $1.8 billion in revenue this year, parent company Warner Bros. Discovery estimates, with that figure rising to $2.2 billion by 2030.
While individual network results have not been disclosed in the news network’s corporate structure for the past several years, they came to light Tuesday as WBD continues to make its case for a pending merger deal with Netflix. The streaming giant shifted the terms of its $82.7 billion offer for WBD’s studio and streaming division to all-cash from a blend of cash and stock.
In a new SEC filing accompanying the announcement of a revised bid, WBD projected its overall networks business, both domestically and outside of the U.S., will decline as CNN rises. The U.S. networks aside from CNN will bring in $9.9 billion in revenue in 2026, sinking to $7.7 billion by 2030, the company estimates. Adjusted EBITDA, a measure of profit, will fall from $3.8 billion to $1.9 billion from 2026 to 2030.
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Discovery Global, the division that houses CNN and other networks, is to be spun off into a separate company later this year, prior to the completion of the Netflix transaction. Paramount, which has made a rival, hostile bid for all of WBD, including the cable networks, has maintained that Discovery Global is essentially worthless given the downward trajectory of pay-TV. Yet the components of the linear TV entity may have greater value if they were to be sold off as individual pieces.
Streaming, expressed in the filing as “new platform revenue,” will contribute about $600 million to CNN’s top line by 2030, WBD estimates. The news network last fall launched its All Access subscription tier, which costs $6.99 a month. In 2022, just days after the closing of the WarnerMedia-Discovery merger, the new bosses at WBD killed a prior streaming initiative, CNN+, objecting to its strategic and financial rationale.
Discovery+, which launched in 2020 and is part of Discovery Global, will collect $800 million in revenue this year, climbing to $1 billion by 2030, WBD estimates.