Entertainment giant Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) had an absolute winner of a day today. The biggest point that gave Warner the advance it did was establishing a new streaming bundle partner in Southeast Asia, which gave Warner access to quite a few new potential customers. The move was tremendous for Warner, and investors responded accordingly. They sent Warner shares up nearly 8% in the closing minutes of Wednesday’s trading.
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Warner is getting together with Viu, a major streaming service in Southeast Asia that will give Warner access to the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. This means that Viu’s standard streaming packages will also come with HBO Max available, and give Warner potentially a major new influx of customers from three different countries.
That should be especially welcome, as recent reports suggested that Warner’s latest upfront was essentially tainted by Warner’s loss of NBA games. In fact, the reports note that things got so bad that Warner did not reveal advertiser commitments, despite the fact that most of its competitors have already revealed the commitments on their end. While Warner did talk about the upfront in general terms, like “…strong pricing and resilient demand for sports programming, and firm pricing for general entertainment,” points like how 2025 compared to 2024 were noticeably absent.
Sound Coverage
Meanwhile, on the topic of Warner’s sports coverage, reports offered a recent look into, of all things, audio transmission for the UCI Mountain Bike World Series. We know that the deal between Warner and Union Cycliste Internationale has been in play for quite some time—since 2023 at last report—but less well-known is what Warner has done to make for immersive coverage through audio.
Reports note that Warner has merged drone footage with audio tracks to provide insight into “…how the bike sounds and how the crowd sounds….” It also increased the total number of microphones on the field to capture sound, and has plans to start incorporating audio directly from the athletes themselves.
Is WBD Stock a Good Buy?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on WBD stock based on 10 Buys and eight Holds assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 61.21% rally in its share price over the past year, the average WBD price target of $13.57 per share implies 12.47% upside potential.
