It was a good fourth quarter for Discovery Communications. The cable network company saw revenues increase 12 percent to $4.2 billion, propelled by a 13 percent uptick in domestic ad revenue (17 percent, if you exclude figures from the defunct Discovery Health) and 7 percent more in affiliate fees.
The report far outstripped Wall Street predictions; Discovery has also been able to leverage higher carriage fees as its true-crime network Investigation Discovery barrels up the cable ranker.
But the network's impressive increases internationally and at Discovery and ID couldn't quite stop analysts from quizzing honcho David Zaslav about OWN, its high-profile, high-cost Oprah Winfrey joint venture.
Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG, flatly asked Zaslav whether the company had the rights to terminate the joint venture or turn the channel into an online network so that it could repurpose the cable real estate it currently takes up.
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