How David Zaslav Plans to Combine Discovery and WarnerMedia to Unleash ‘Shock and Awe’ on the Streaming Wars

His day started off with a sobering phone call with Suzy Welch, author, host and widow of longtime General Electric CEO Jack Welch. The morning headlines from the once largest company in the world and citadel of corporate America came as a jolt to Zaslav, who previously worked for then-GE-owned NBC for 18 years.

This past May, Zaslav pulled off Hollywood’s biggest boardroom coup in decades, bringing together Discovery’s businesses with AT&T’s WarnerMedia in a deal that positions him as Hollywood’s newest media baron. He helped orchestrate the surprise merger agreement with AT&T CEO“We’ve been going side by side, John Stankey and I, and we’ve been fighting the same seas,” Zaslav says. “When you put these two boats together, we’re gonna blow by everybody.

“Most of the media business is so mired in what has been happening and where we’ve been, and we really need to focus this company on where we’re going and how lucky we are to have the assets and the hand we have in an environment where I have been for a long time,” he says. “The industry is in the midst of a full evolution.”

“Our job is to grow the right side of the company — the streaming business, the motion picture business and the TV production business — faster than the traditional business declines,” Zaslav says.Zaslav is naturally head cheerleader for the transaction, and he’s unsurprisingly bullish on the combined company’s chances of competing alongside Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon and Hulu in the top echelon of broad-based streaming services.

Zaslav acknowledges that although Warner Bros. has certainly had its share of upheaval, it is not alone: “We’re in like the seventh inning of disruption,” he says, “and every media company has gone through down-sizing and restructuring. People are scared; the world is changing. They’re not sure their jobs are going to be the same tomorrow and they’re right … and not all media companies are going to survive.

“We’ve had a lot more success [in Europe] putting all our content together than in packaging them separately. When we put sports, news, all of our entertainment and all of our nonfiction together in some markets, we have found lower churn and higher growth,” he says. “When I was running the cable group for NBC, GE was the largest company in the world. And GE was also the stock that was the most widely held. And Jack [Welch] used to say this all the time — he would say it in our hardest moments — that there are more retirees in America that own GE stock and are counting on us,” Zaslav recalls. “So get in there on Sunday, stay all night when you need to. We’ve got to continue to innovate and innovate and innovate.

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