So with the recent merger of Warner Bros+ Discovery, the new company has been deleting alot of shows and movies from its various stream platforms. Including Infinity Train, Final Space, and even a couple hundred episodes of sesame street.
Even the new bat girl was canceled, but I can understand that b/c it was not released they might be able to write that off.
Is all that content just gone to the ether now?
How can they claim content, some of which is 8+ years old as a tax write off?
Are they treating it like a business would write the cost of a machine over its lifetime? But don’t businesses keep the machines?
In: 1
The money was broken into two pieces.
$496 million for “impairment”. Meaning they already produced the series or movie or whatever, or purchases rights to it, but because they are pulling it they are losing money on the investment.
$329 million for “development”. Those programs are programs that are still under development but never released yet. Because they’ve spent the money, it can be used as a write off.
All businesses can do this. It’s just because it’s Warner/Discovery it’s in a lot of the news.
For example:
If Microsoft was developing a new piece of software, and spent $450 million dollars to develop it and put it up for sale, but sales was really really bad. So they pull it down instead of taking bad reputation. They would take the 450 million and subtract the money they did get, and write the rest off.
In a similar way, if Apple was developing a new iPhone feature, and spent $300 million developing it. Then, they decided to abandon the product, they would be able to write off the money they spent on development.
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