Raphael Stevens

Charter customers will be able to watch “Monday Night Football” as ESPN and other Disney networks are restored.
Charter secured the ability to offer Disney+ and ESPN+ for free to select consumers of certain cable bundle packages.
While getting access to some of Disney’s streaming services is significant, it’s far from the transformational event that Charter hinted at.

Devin Singletary #26 of the Buffalo Bills runs the ball against the New York Jets at Highmark Stadium on December 11, 2022 in Orchard Park, New York.
Timothy T Ludwig | Getty Images

Charter and Disney have reached a rights deal, and the media industry was duped.
The Wall Street Journal ran a story Friday with the headline: “Disney Fight Marks Cable TV’s Last Stand.” Slate’s headline the same day honed in further: “Disney Is in a Fight That Might Change TV Forever.” Analysts appearing on CNBC weighed in on the future of the cable bundle.

“Mutually assured destruction is a good way of thinking about it,” said Michael Morris, Guggenheim Securities entertainment and media analyst, about how both Disney and Charter would be at existential risk if they didn’t reach a carriage deal for networks including ESPN and owned ABC television stations.
For the past 10 days, Charter Chief Executive Chris Winfrey has been putting the business on notice, telling reporters and investors that its decision to drop Disney’s networks wasn’t a normal carriage fight. After decades of agreeing to programming increases which have caused tens of millions of Americans to cancel cable, seeing it as a too-expensive, bloated product, a pay-TV operator had reached its “No Mas” point.
“We had to say, enough is enough,” Winfrey said Thursday at a Goldman Sachs investor conference.
But the details of Charter’s pact with Disney, announced in a press release Monday, don’t really suggest enough was enough. Disney will receive a higher programming fee increase as part of the deal, CNBC’s David Faber first reported. Charter will be able to include ad-supported Disney+ and ESPN+ for no additional charge to certain consumers of its cable TV programming, as part of a wholesale agreement with Disney.
That’s kind of it. Including Disney’s streaming packages for cable subscribers is a significant and unprecedented give. But this is not a groundbreaking deal. It’s an incremental deal suggestive of a slow-moving landscape where media companies aren’t yet ready to let go of cable, a declining multibillion dollar cash generating behemoth.

The sides got a deal done in time for cable customers to watch “Monday Night Football” on ESPN for Week 1, which has always been the primary deadline on carriage deals for decades. Charter customers didn’t get to watch the U.S. Open tennis finals this weekend. But, in the end, Charter wouldn’t risk losing millions of customers if it didn’t offer “Monday Night Football” — especially to New York area fans, as the New York Jets (and new quarterback Aaron Rodgers) play the Buffalo Bills — and Disney wouldn’t risk the revenue losses of blacking out football.
Instead, media executive rhetoric won the day. Carriage disputes between pay-TV providers and networks are old hat. It’s become standard procedure for executives of pay-TV companies and programmers to rage at each other in strongly worded statements where distributors talk about the rising cost of cable and media companies counter with the importance of their content. In recent years, media journalists have largely caught on and haven’t taken the bait.
This deal was different because Winfrey said it was different. He held an investor call the day after Charter and Disney didn’t reach a deal, an unusual move signaling that maybe Charter was content to start moving away from the linear cable TV business – something that then-Cablevision CEO Jim Dolan talked about as a possibility 10 years ago.
But there’s a reason why Dolan discussed this concept a decade ago and still linear cable TV exists. Charter still makes money by offering linear cable TV. Comcast, the largest U.S. cable TV provider, owns a slew of cable networks. DirecTV and Dish don’t have robust broadband businesses so both companies are reliant on staying in the business, no matter how dominant streaming becomes.
It’s a happy ending for cable consumers, who get to watch what they’re already paying for. But it’s not a transformative deal — and the media should remember this conflict’s resolution when the inevitable next channel blackout occurs.
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal, which owns CNBC.
WATCH: Disney and Charter reach carriage agreement. More

Elon Musk’s SpaceX signed a hefty deal with satellite operator Telesat.
The Lightspeed missions will fly on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.
Telesat still has a 2019 agreement in place with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.

A rendering of Telesat’s low earth orbit broadband constellation.

PARIS – Competitors or not, SpaceX continues to be willing to launch for other satellite internet companies.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX signed a hefty deal with satellite operator Telesat, the companies announced Monday. The agreement covers 14 launches of the Canadian venture’s Lightspeed internet satellites.

Telesat will utilize SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, with missions beginning in 2026. Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg heralded Falcon 9 as a “great value proposition.” 
“It’s affordable, it’s reliable … they can launch multiple satellites a week. It’s phenomenal,” Goldberg told CNBC.
SpaceX has used its rockets to launch communications satellites for companies that compete directly or indirectly with its global Starlink internet network. Recent examples include satellites for OneWeb, Viasat, and EchoStar. These deals come as an Amazon shareholder alleges the company snubbed SpaceX for launch contracts of the tech giant’s Kuiper internet satellites.

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Financial terms for Telesat’s deal with SpaceX were not disclosed. SpaceX advertises Falcon 9 launches for $67 million each, which would put Telesat’s purchase around $900 million at that pricing.
Telesat’s purchase comes as an answer to needing dependable rides to orbit in short order. Despite Telesat’s 2019 agreement with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to use its New Glenn rocket, delays in New Glenn’s development mean that rocket has yet to launch for the first time.

Goldberg told CNBC on Monday that the agreement with Blue Origin is still in place. He cited non-disclosure agreements for why he can’t disclose the number of New Glenn launches that Telesat has lined up, but noted Blue Origin gives his company future “optionality” and believes New Glenn will “in the fullness of time be a great launch vehicle.”
Goldberg has previously emphasized to CNBC that Lightspeed is not intended to compete in direct-to-consumer markets against SpaceX’s Starlink or Amazon’s Kuiper. Instead, it will maintain Telesat’s existing focus on enterprise customers — government and commercial markets, however, that Starlink has expanded into over the past year.
Earlier this summer Telesat announced a swap in the manufacturer of its Lightspeed satellites, with Canadian space company MDA taking the place of French-Italian manufacturer Thales Alenia Space. That deal saves Telesat about $2 billion in launching its network of 198 satellites.
“It was a home run,” Goldberg said Monday of the MDA contract. More

Pratt & Whitney’s parent said an engine manufacturing issue will hit its pretax results by $3 billion this quarter.
RTX disclosed the issue in July.
The problem stems from a flaw in powder metal used to make some of the engine parts.

Model of a Pratt & Whitney GTF engine is displayed at the 54th International Paris Air Show at Le Bourget Airport near Paris, France, June 20, 2023. 
Benoit Tessier | Reuters

RTX said Monday that an engine manufacturing flaw forcing accelerated inspections will hit its pretax results this quarter by $3 billion, sending shares lower in premarket trading.
The problem stems from flaws with powder metal used to make some of the popular Pratt & Whitney GTF engines. That issue is forcing inspections on hundreds of engines ahead of schedule, depriving airlines of some aircraft during a travel rebound in the pandemic’s wake.

RTX said that about 600 to 700 engines beyond the company’s early forecast will have to be removed for shop visits through 2026.
The engines power many of the popular Airbus A320neo planes and others.
RTX, formerly known as Raytheon Technologies, reaffirmed its adjusted earnings estimates of $4.95 to $5.05 a share for 2023. But it said it expects a $1.5 billion hit to cash flow in 2025, bringing that estimate to $7.5 billion from an earlier estimate of $9 billion.
The company said it expects the issue to cost up to $7 billion. Pratt & Whitney has a 51% share in the GTF PW1000 engine program and the cost will be shared. More

Smucker has agreed to pay $34.25 per share, or roughly $5.6 billion, to acquire Hostess Brands.
Hostess saw demand for its Twinkies slip after raising prices, sparking investor concern and takeover interest from larger rivals.
The deal is expected to close in Smucker’s fiscal third quarter, which ends in January.

Hostess Twinkies and CupCakes are displayed on a store shelf on May 17, 2021 in San Anselmo, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Jelly maker J.M. Smucker is buying Twinkie owner Hostess Brands for $5.6 billion, or $34.25 a share.
Hostess shareholders will receive $30 in cash and .03002 shares of Smucker’s stock for each share of Hostess that they owned. Smucker has also agreed to assume Hostess’s debt of roughly $900 million. The deal is expected to close in Smucker’s fiscal third quarter, which ends in January.

Smucker’s purchase is the latest in a flurry of deals by Big Food, which is hunting for growth as pandemic gains slip away. Campbell’s Soup recently announced its acquisition of Rao’s pasta sauce owner Sovos Bands for $2.7 billion. M&M’s owner Mars bought Kevin’s Natural Foods in July. And Unilever snapped up frozen yogurt brand Yasso in June.
Shares of Hostess climbed 18% in premarket trading Monday on the announcement. Smucker’s stock fell 7.5%.
As of Friday’s close, shares of Hostess stock have risen 25% this year, giving the company a market value of $3.73 billion. But the company’s shares had already received a significant boost after Reuters reported in late August that it was considering a sale after fielding interest from large food companies, including PepsiCo and Oreo maker Mondelez International.
Hostess saw demand for its Twinkies and Ding Dongs slip after raising prices to mitigate higher commodity costs, sparking investor concern and takeover interest from larger rivals. For the full year, the company is anticipating that its volume will decline. Executives paused price hikes.
Its sale to Smucker ends Hostess’s seven-year streak as an independent, publicly traded company. Hostess went public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company in 2016.
Just three years earlier, Apollo Global Management and Metropoulos & Co. resurrected the company, ending a monthslong Twinkie drought, after acquiring the assets of the company formerly known as Interstate Bakeries. More

The Export-Import Bank of the United States, or EXIM, is no stranger to financing space projects and is working through a $5 billion pipeline of applications.
“In our pipeline related to this industry, about $1.3 billion are likely to come to fruition within a year and another $4 billion that we’re looking at are a little less further along,” EXIM Vice Chair Judith Pryor said on Monday.
Pryor emphasized that EXIM is increasingly seeing applications from companies building low Earth orbit satellite networks, also known as LEO constellations, for services such as communications and imagery.

A Falcon Heavy rocket launches the Viasat-3 “Americas” satellite on May 1, 2023.

PARIS – The U.S. export credit agency is working through a $5 billion pipeline of applications related to the space industry, as companies look to fund projects in orbit in a tighter capital market.
The Export-Import Bank of the United States, or EXIM, is no stranger to financing space projects such as satellite and rocket products. EXIM generally sees more applications during tougher economic times, as the previous bulk of its financing for the space sector came between 2010 and 2015.

“In our pipeline related to this industry, about $1.3 billion are likely to come to fruition within a year and another $4 billion that we’re looking at are a little less further along,” Judith Pryor, EXIM’s first vice president and vice chair of the board of directors, said on Monday at the 2023 World Satellite Business Week conference.

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EXIM has helped U.S. space companies win contracts for foreign entities, especially to give an extra edge when they are competing with China.
Pryor said EXIM is increasingly seeing applications from companies building low Earth orbit satellite networks, also known as LEO constellations, for services such as communications and imagery. The bank acts as an alternative lender to support U.S. companies and examines “each individual transaction on its own merits” rather than focus on specific areas of the space industry, Pryor said.
“We don’t discriminate. We don’t pick winners or losers,” Pryor said. More