Welcome to Edition 8.01 of the Rocket Report! Today's edition will be a little shorter than normal because, for one day only, we celebrate fake rockets—fireworks—rather than the real thing. For our American readers, we hope you have a splendid Fourth of July holiday weekend. For our non-American readers, you may be wondering what the heck is happening in our country right now. Alas, making sense of <waves hands> all this is beyond the scope of this humble little newsletter.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Will Orbex ever launch an orbital rocket? Orbex, a launch services company based in the United Kingdom, has announced the postponement of its first orbital launch to 2026 due to infrastructure limitations and other issues, Orbital Today reports. At the Paris Air Show at Le Bourget, Orbex chief executive Miguel Bello Mora announced that the company is now targeting next year for the liftoff of its Prime rocket from SaxaVord in Scotland. He said the delay is partly due to the limited launch infrastructure at SaxaVord and a "bottleneck" in site operations.
Amazon Prime Video subscribers aren’t the only streaming customers being subjected to longer commercial breaks lately. Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD) Max has increased the amount of commercials it shows to US subscribers from approximately four minutes per hour to about six minutes per hour.
A US support page for Max currently says that subscribers to Max with ads “can expect about 6 minutes of ads per hour.” But PCWorld noticed this week that this differs from what Max used to claim, which as recently as February was “about 4 minutes” of ads an hour, per the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Some of Max’s geographies have smaller ad loads. For example, WBD's support page for Saint Kitts and Nevis says Max ad subscribers should expect about four minutes of ads hourly.
A 50 percent increase in the duration of commercials that US subscribers see puts Max’s ad load on par with that of Prime Video, which AdWeek reported last week also increased its ad load from four minutes per hour to six minutes per hour. For comparison, Netflix shows four to five minutes of ads per hour, according to earlier PC World reporting, and Peacock shows to five to seven minutes of ads hourly, per The Streamable.
Warner Bros. Discovery will split its business into two publicly traded companies, with one focused on its streaming and studios business and the other on its television network businesses, including CNN and Discovery.
The US media giant said the move would unlock value for shareholders as well as create opportunities for both businesses, breaking up a group created just three years ago from the merger of Warner Media and Discovery.
Warner Bros. Discovery last year revealed its intent to split its business in two, a plan first reported by the Financial Times in July last year. The company intends to complete the split by the middle of next year.
WBD's David Zaslav is partly undoing the merger that brought together Warner Media and Discovery.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Warner Bros. Discovery — the brainchild of media mogul David Zaslav — is splitting up.
Wall Street had long questioned the wisdom of WBD, and Zaslav now seems to agree.
While this spinoff was predictable, it sparks questions for other media companies.
The ill-fated marriage between Warner Bros. and Discovery is heading for divorce — and Wall Street is cheering.
Warner Bros. Discovery on Monday announced plans to split its declining TV networks from its growing streaming and studios business. This spinoff proposal comes three years after WBD's inception. If all goes well, the spinoff will happen in mid-2026.
WBD CEO David Zaslav will oversee the sexier streaming part, while CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels — known for delivering "synergies" — will be in charge of the shrinking networks. WBD isn't alone, as Comcast is also splitting from most of its cable assets.
WBD shares were up as much as 13% in early trading. (However, Comcast's stock also popped when its spinoff was announced last fall, and has since fallen more than 20%.)
"The decision to separate Warner Bros. Discovery reflects our belief that each company can now go further and faster apart than they can together," Zaslav said on a call with investors about the spinoff.
When asked for comment, a WBD spokesperson referred Business Insider to comments made by executives on the investor call.
Better late than never
Many media analysts were initially excited when Zaslav orchestrated the deal to form WBD. But they soon soured on the media conglomerate as cord-cutting accelerated and WBD's streamer — Max/HBO Max — missed lofty expectations and failed to truly challenge the likes of Netflix.
Zaslav and company took note. WBD executives telegraphed this spinoff by reorganizing the business late last year, separating the TV networks from its studios and streaming businesses.
Wall Street was pleased by this potential split, which was the key catalyst for WBD's stock's 16% rally in the past month, UBS media analyst John Hodulik told BI last week.
Others agreed.
"Investor excitement for a Warner Bros. Discovery spin-off of its Global Linear Networks is building by the day," Lightshed analysts led by Rich Greenfield wrote last week.
Bank of America's Jessica Reif Ehrlich wrote in an early-June note that a "spin of studios and streaming could be the best way to unlock the significant unrecognized value of the company."
So far, it seems like she's right.
A sign of the times?
WBD's announcement will likely spark more speculation about future reordering of the media and entertainment landscape.
It's long been the expectation among industry insiders that WBD's spun-off linear networks would combine with others, potentially Versant, the linear assets that Comcast is spinning off. Other ideas that have been floated in media circles are a combination with Paramount — assuming its Skydance deal ever gets approved — or with Fox's linear assets.
Reordering is also afoot across the advertising industry. Two giant holding companies, Omnicom Group and Interpublic Group, are in the process of combining. Their peer WPP is replacing its CEO, Mark Read.
One wild card in the mix with WBD is CNN, with President Donald Trump's general hostility to deals involving media companies.
CNN anchor Jake Tapper and his colleagues face an increasingly uncertain future.
CNN/YouTube
Longtime ad industry analyst Brian Wieser remarked that the news network could be an asset and a liability, given its history and future ability to attract the ire of Trump, who has been aggressive in targeting the mainstream media.
Wieser wrote on Monday that CNN would "probably benefit" from being separated from all of WBD's other assets as it's "the one part of WBD that could tie up other parts of this transaction so long as any government approvals are required to facilitate its completion."
Another question is the fate of WBD's studio business, which has been dragged down. On a call Monday announcing the separation, Zaslav emphasized that the movie business was harder to project than TV. But he said that by leaning into well-known IP, he saw WBD's studios arm becoming a $3 billion business.
The separation also could put WBD's studios business in play, Bernstein's Lauren Yoon said.
The companies that could ingest such a business include Amazon, Disney, Netflix, and Comcast. However, most of the tech companies haven't historically been big acquirers, and the timing isn't ideal.
"No tech companies want to give the government any reason to be in their business," said Jonathan Miller, chief executive of Integrated Media, which specializes in digital media investments.
Also, expect Bob Iger to field new questions about what's ahead for Disney's linear and cable networks. He once floated the idea of selling them, though he then retreated from the idea.
Disney's line at the time was that it wouldn't get the price it wanted if it sold those properties and that it'd be too complex to separate them from the rest of the company. Iger and Trump have also sparred in the past, and Disney could look to avoid deals that need government approval.
Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav owns a lot of cable TV networks — but doesn't want to do that anymore.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Would you like to own CNN, TNT, and the Discovery Channel?
Warner Bros. Discovery owns them now — but wants to get rid of them.
WBD's move follows a similar one Comcast announced a few months ago. Because while cable TV networks still make money, they're a business in permanent decline.
That is the pitch that Warner Bros. Discovery is making to Wall Street now that it has announced it's splitting itself into two companies: One will own Warners' movie and television studio and the HBO Max streaming service; the other — which it's calling its "global networks" unit — will own a bunch of cable TV networks including CNN, TNT, Discovery and the Food Network.
Like Comcast, WBD insists that no, really, it's splitting off its cable TV networks so they can grow and thrive on their own, and you'd be lucky to buy a piece of them.
"The global networks business is a real business," WBD CEO David Zaslav said on the company's investor call Monday morning.
That is definitely true, since those cable networks continue to generate profits. It's also something you don't normally feel compelled to say when you're selling something people want to buy.
The WBD split will generate all kinds of questions to ponder. Some of them are technical: How will WBD's $35 billion in debt be split up between the companies? How will the split companies approach future distribution deals with the likes of Comcast and Charter? How quickly could Comcast and WBD combine their two cable groups into one bigger cable group? Will the split help WBD's stock (it's up Monday — but note that Comcast also spiked when it announced its deal last fall, and has fallen some 20% since)?
Some questions the WBD split can generate may also matter to people who don't care about corporate finance. Such as: What does this mean for the future of CNN — the news channel that's struggling to find a lane in a loud and crowded media environment, but whose brand still has lots of potential value?
But the big takeaway is the obvious takeaway: The people who run the biggest collections of cable TV channels in the country would like someone else to own them. Because every quarter, the number of people who watch those channels and pay for those channels gets smaller.
Like I said late last year: These are garage sales. Maybe someone will want to own shrinking businesses that still throw off lots of cash (paging private equity). But the people who have them now think they'd be better off without them. Buyer beware.
Should the city of Houston, which proudly bills itself as "Space City," have a prized Space Shuttle orbiter on public display?
More than a decade ago, arguably, the answer was yes. After all, the Space Shuttle program was managed from Johnson Space Center, in southeastern Houston. All the astronauts who flew on the shuttle trained there. And the vehicle was operated out of Mission Control at the Houston-based facility.
But when the final decisions were being made to distribute the shuttles 15 years ago, the Houston community dragged its feet on putting together a competitive proposal. There were also questions about the ability of Space Center Houston to raise funding to house the shuttle within a new display area, which magnified concerns that the historical vehicle, like a Saturn V rocket before it, would be left outside in the region's humid environment. Finally, other cities offered better proposals for displaying the shuttles to the public.
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