Will a $30 billion dollar company be big enough?

Claire Atkinson reports in NBC News,

After three years of negotiations, CBS and Viacom are coming together to form a $30 billion company, controlled by Shari Redstone and cementing her status as possibly the most influential woman in media.

The merger comes at a time when upheaval in the traditional pay-TV market and the rise of digital streaming services have changed the economics of the entertainment industry and pressured media companies to either grow or sell themselves off. With streaming video companies like Netflix now the leading story, CBS and Viacom are fusing their war chests to better compete in the rapidly morphing world of TV and film watching.

But the combined company will still be far smaller than many of the media titans that it will need to compete with.

“Will they be big enough?” said Jessica Reif Ehrlich, senior media and entertainment analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “It may enhance the strategic positioning of CBS-Viacom, but will it be enough? Scale matters.”

…The newly merged company will house a host of valuable media assets. Under CBS Corporation, the larger of the two companies, are the CBS broadcast network, local TV stations, the premium pay-TV channel Showtime, Network Ten in Australia, 50 percent of the CW Network with WarnerMedia, and the book publisher Simon & Schuster. Viacom owns Paramount Pictures, a variety of cable TV channels including as MTV and Comedy Central, Channel Five TV in the U.K., and Argentina’s Telefe TV network.

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