Show Notes
Media companies call their content libraries their biggest asset, but the balance sheet shows capitalized production cost less amortization, which says nothing about what the titles earn. The position here is blunt: a show that cost 40 million and earns nothing carries the same way as one that cost 10 million and prints cash, so cost-based carrying value is close to meaningless.
You come away able to build a discounted cash flow model per title or cluster, apply a decay curve to post-release revenue, and test for the three failure points: catalog versus new releases, rights expiry by territory, and platform dependency on a single output deal. The Clearlake-Chelsea structure shows how contracted rights earn a lower discount rate, and the Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount impairments show what happens when they do not.
0:00 Why content libraries sit at cost 1:02 Building a per-title cash flow model 2:10 Three places library valuation breaks down 2:47 What the Clearlake-Chelsea deal revealed 3:36 Streaming write-downs and proving durability
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