By Lucas Manfredi

Comcast is expected to move forward with a plan to spinoff its cable network portfolio, which includes MSNBC, CNBC, USA, Oxygen, E!, Syfy and Golf Channel, into a standalone, publicly traded company, TheWrap has learned. A formal announcement is expected as soon as Wednesday.

The move, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, is expected to be structured as a tax-free spinoff to Comcast shareholders that will take around a year to complete. The venture’s ownership structure will see Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts hold a one-third voting stake, though he will not be on the spun-off entity’s board.

By Sharon Knolle

Netflix and Meta are being sued for an alleged anticompetitive agreement that, the suit states, involved the deliberate “hobbling” of Facebook Watch.

The proposed class action suit, which was filed in Illinois federal court on Monday, argues that “Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg became ‘of the same trade’ [in 2017] when Facebook began to directly compete against Netflix in the market for video-streaming services” by launching Watch, “a video-streaming platform that offered consumers the same kind of TV-like shows that were Netflix’s bread and butter.”

By Alexei Barrionuevo

The question of whether streaming can become a profitable business for major entertainment companies has been a prevailing theme of the past year.

This quarter’s corporate earnings, which concluded last week, showed that Disney is the one company poised to successfully make the pivot from declining linear TV to startup streaming.