iWorld
Discovery extends David Zaslav’s employment contract
MUMBAI: When you swing a deal like he has done, you probably deserve to be rewarded. Discovery president & CEO David Zaslav played a key role in getting AT&T’s WarnerMedia to align itself with the network he leads, an announcement of which was made earlier this week. Well, his labour has yielded fruit as his employment contract has been extended to run through 31 December 2027 from its previous effective date of 2023.
Of course, we all know that the merger of the two media firms will lead to the creation of a behemoth offering WarnerMedia’s premium entertainment, sports, and news assets and Discovery’s leading nonfiction and international entertainment and sports businesses. And it was announced that Zaslav will lead the proposed new company.
Since joining it in 2007, Zaslav has steered Discovery to new heights starting with taking it public in 2008, stream rolling it into the Fortune500 in 2014, acquiring Scripps Networks Interactive, in a transaction which closed in 2018 and ramping up its direct-to-consumer efforts under discovery+. The definitive real-life subscription streaming service launched in the US in January 2021 with more than 55,000 episodes, and internationally, continues its rollout to more than 25 markets and accounts for 15 million subs already.
The Discovery comprises nearly 20 per cent of ad-supported pay-TV viewership in the US and nearly seven billion monthly video views, making it the No 1 pay-TV portfolio in Uncle Sam, claims a press release. And its global distribution has surpassed three billion viewers.
Before Discovery Zaslav had a distinguished career at NBCUniversal, where he was instrumental in developing and launching CNBC and also played a role in the creation of MSNBC.
