When David Zaslav restructured Warner Bros. Discovery late last year, splitting his declining cable networks off from the growth-oriented streaming and studios business and the ever-prestigious HBO, the implications were self-evident. Officially, Zaz was “enhancing” WBD’s strategic flexibility and optimizing his TV business to drive free cashflow. But anyone with a rudimentary grasp of the industry’s trajectory, and WBD’s place in it, knew he was taking the first step toward spinning off the linear assets, just as NBCUniversal had done with MSNBC, USA, CNBC, Oxygen, etcetera—a portfolio now known as Versant—a few weeks earlier. “This was a big For Sale sign,” one veteran media executive told me the day it happened. Accordingly, WBD’s long-embattled stock popped 15 percent.