Wall Street Bails on Big Media Stocks ⇥ recode.net

Peter Kafka, Recode:

Share prices for the biggest TV programmers are all nose-diving. Disney is down 9 percent. Time Warner is down 8 percent. Viacom and 21st Century Fox are down 7 percent. […]

The conventional wisdom, which seems right to me, is that all of this stems from Disney’s earnings call yesterday, when Bob Iger and co. admitted that yes, Disney had indeed seen subscriber losses at ESPN — just as the Wall Street Journal had written a month ago, in a piece that shook up the industry.

With this in mind, will the forthcoming Apple TV subscription service be reported and viewed as a media industry saviour — a la the early narrative that the iPad would save the print industry — or is it going to be seen as a thorn in media companies’ sides?