Greg Maffei At Morgan Stanley TMT Conference Notes

Updated on
  • Formula 1: great international sports franchise; 400 million+ TV audience; many parts of the business are under-exploited such as sponsorships.
  • Chase Carey is a great manager who has brought on some top-tier talent to round out the management team.
  • Race calendar is locked in for 2017 and probably 2018. Sponsorship has the most potential for near-term improvements.
  • The races need to be more interesting. This will take some time.
  • They think the opportunity is bigger than they first thought.
  • Teams have an interest in a more balanced league will make the product more compelling.
  • Best TV deal is in the U.K. There is a lot of potential to improve the TV deal in the U.S.
  • Liberty Sirius XM.
  • Pandora is way under monetized. The subscription streaming business does not have very good economics. The free radio market is still a $16 billion market. Perhaps Pandora could help Sirius to go after some of that money.
  • Future of connected car. In some ways, this will threaten Sirius because there will be more options in the car. But the two-way connectivity can help Sirius provide a better service.
  • The Agero platform has signed up a number of car manufacturers.
  • Liberty Broadband.
  • Lots of M&A discussion. The current administration is positive for more consolidation. There are not many cable targets left. Charter is very bullish on future prospects. They have a great management team and the comp structure is well aligned.
  • Charter is confident on the mobile offering. There is upside here.
  • QVC
  • Has grown for the past 30 years. Only a couple periods of no-growth. There were distractions around the election which persist. There are some green shoots. Some positive trends.
  • Liberty Broadband sells at discount. That will go away when Broadband is merged into Charter or Charter is sold. They have borrowing capacity to take advantage of the discount to juice the returns.
  • Howard is locked up for quite awhile. No other content provider stands out as a big threat.

Article by Greg Speicher

Leave a Comment