The exit of Moonves will mean a better chance of a remerger, and with it the possibility of the sale of the combined company to a third party (with Charter being my lead candidate, following the lead of Comcast/NBCUniversal and AT&T/Time Warner).
Another positive aspect of the remerger would be Paramount reclaiming the TV rights to The Odd Couple from CBS and producing a new version for another network, perhaps Fox since that network will be separated from its primary programming provider soon.
I don't think it will necessarily be Charter, Verizon, or even Dish. Sure they have minor cable assets but those can be easily sold off to the media companies. So we have NBCUniversal from Comcast, WarnerMedia from AT&T, Disney-Fox, CBSViacom, and Sony. Focus on Sony, the parent company is still loaded itself in Tokyo and they just hired Erik Moreno, formerly of Time and Fox, to be their EVP for Corporate Development and M&A. Sony's foray into film and TV is not as big as games and music and even Crackle hasn't been that great. I see them acquiring CBSViacom with National Amusements being a big Sony stock shareholder and merging their studio with it to seek scale and more useful IP, they'll probably retire the Sony name for some of the labeling and more towards like AT&T's WarnerMedia. This is a way for Disney to buy back the Spider-Man film rights and Men In Black also in case it could be used for the MCU (they were published as non-Marvel comics, but became IP once Marvel bought Malibu Comics, if film rights are in the hand and they suddenly join the Marvel Comics Universe like Conan's return, they can join the MCU) and since Sony is buying their competitor. If Venom fails, then this is what they're going to pursue to bring back some profit (Spongebob, Dora, TMNT, Hasbro movies (Power Rangers!), Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, a broadcast network, big cable network group with reality shows full of crazy people and weird environments, a premium TV network group, a publishing house. I believe they will likely sell off their joint stake in CW to AT&T's WarnerMedia, since they're the only one who doesn't fully own a broadcast network, only half of CW belongs to them and the DOJ might tell Sony that you can't own one and a half broadcast networks and divest CW. CW will be renamed something that represents Warner Bros. and Turner and will be folded into Turner like how broadcast networks for others are in big network groups and CNN will be their national news time and they'll probably get into buying local broadcast stations and Warner Bros. TV will fully be able to bring more variety of programming into it. At least Sony will bring their own TCM-style movie channel, but don't know if they or AT&T (for WarnerMedia's Turner Networks) will get the other half of GSN for full control. Animax and Funimation will be doing something with Nick, maybe a newly formed collaborative channel for anime and for the main network, also probably. Crackle, CBS, and Showtime All Access will be combined with all of the Sony-CBSViacom film and TV library into one streaming service. People on this forum were kind of right about AT&T's WarnerMedia in the future buying out MGM (including likely Epix folding into HBO or even Cinemax to grow it and merging MGM HD with TCM, MGM's other local broadcasting networks could turn into cable networks) and possibly Samuel Goldwyn Films (not the one that was bought out by MGM, the current one) to complete the Goldwyn family media library and the Castle Rock Entertainment library (pre-1994 from MGM and post-1994 from Warner Bros.) and they could also buy Seinfeld, The Powers that Be, Thea, and Boston Common from Sony for Castle Rock. That just seems something likely to happen since WarnerMedia has MGM's pre-1986 library. Also wondering why Star Trek hasn't decided to do more animation which could go on Nickelodeon for younger audiences since it could then finally compete with the Star Wars animated series (TCW, Rebels, Resistance) which are pretty okay to watch. Three of the four big media companies will be independent have many shareholders as owners except for Comcast (owned by the Roberts family, I don't think Sony is owned by a single owner) which is interesting, the end of major private ownership in Hollywood. If Sony does end up getting bought out as a whole, not just the entertainment side, I would want it to be Apple because they can both work together to input PlayStation tech into the MacBooks, iMac, iPads, and maybe iPhones to become competitive gaming devices with PCs.
I'd posted this back in 2016, over ten years ago!
