tom: michael nathanson, i guess everybody is still chasing netflix. success, "mank," "the queen's gambit," the rest of it. do they still have enough in the pipeline to keep the rest away? michael: they are going to come back with a ton of content in the second half of this year, and they put a lot of emphasis on big movies. you are going to see some major blockbusters coming from them that you would've thought were theatrical releases that will be on the flex. -- on netflix. towards the fall, you start seeing that, what you described as previous hits coming back, but you have a period now where hbo max is probably going to take a lot more share just because they have theatrical release movies going on hbo max day and date. so we have a bit of a slow period before it picks up again in the fourth quarter. jonathan: michael, i wonder whether we are reaching that point where people look around at the cost of all of these streaming businesses and just say, i'm not doing this anymore. 15 pound here, 20 pound there, 10 pounds here, $10, $15, and they just say

lisa: michael nathanson, is this the best way to clean up this mess? michael: good morning.he only way. there is really no one else. i am surprised by the timing, because hbo max has potential to create more value, but at&t couldn't wait. so this is a really good outcome for discovery. that is my take on it. lisa: do you think discovery would be able to charge the amount necessary for cistercian fees to compete with the likes of netflix with this acquisition, or do you think this could also be viewed as just an ongoing mistake adding to the mess already created? michael: i was just looking at the market cap for netflix and disney. hbo max is in the same league long-term as those assets, they just have not gotten there yet, because they are not global. and you have a call option. where evaluation is, it is a call option, hbo max to the upper league, and discovery plus, a lower tier product that will be helped by cnn. for them, why not? this is not expensive. i know they will manage it well. money is cheap. given where disney has moved to one streaming hopes, why wouldn't you

lisa: michael nathanson basically said this was a mess that needed to be cleaned up, and this was a late -- this was a way to clean it up. it is fascinating how this leads to the bigger stories in the streaming world post-pandemic. how much will the pandemic reality be the norm going ahead, and how much does the content drive devalue value if you have enough of it? jonathan: moffettnathanson and the team were on earlier. comcast, viacomcbs, and disney could all be interested, while at&t on comcast would be the most likely buyers. so maybe in many ways, maybe people thinking this could be the beginning. lisa: using your cash, not just holding it on your balance sheet. people want to see where companies deploy their cash. you are saying a record pace of share buybacks. you wonder how much is actually going to go into capital expenditures, and to employee training and some of these other virtuous cycle investments a lot of people are waiting for. jonathan: if at&t get a good chunk of change, maybe some of it does go into buybacks. the amount of debt these companies are carrying are you monk

michael nathanson joins us michael, great to have you weigh in here on this. i mean david covered some great angles there the one i wanted to come to first, 400 million direct-to-consumer subscribers globally is that pie in the sky or is that actually quite possible now? >> give me a time frame, right pie in the sky the next five to seven years, i think so. the challenge is going to be, as you move into asian pacific, latin america, you'll have all these people on mobile phones who never had paid tv and had very large rpus. so it's possible with all the people in the world who are mobily connected, right? in the near term we're not expecting that but on a 10, 15-year view, it's certainly possible. >> and so to the point that david zaslav was talking about in the interview earlier about the way in which you're going to be able to take all of this content of the two combined companies and sell it directly to consumers around the world, was he kind of overegging the element to which this merger allows that to happen versus just some old rights deals running to ex