“This is weaker than it was during Covid,” Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said at an RBC conference last November, adding that “things got a lot worse” in 2022’s final months.

NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell didn’t have a much cheerier outlook while speaking at a UBS conference a month later, speculating on the reasons behind the soft market: “It’s hard to figure out whether that’s because of macro-conditions—whether people’s businesses are worsening—or rather because people are just uncertain.”