CBS just misses third-quarter Wall Street estimates

CBS Television Studios

CBS has had a bit of a rough third quarter. In their Tuesday earnings call, they revealed that they missed Wall Street estimates for revenue, although that’s not to say they didn’t have some victories.

A piece from Reuters explains that while Wall Street expected the company to hit revenues of $3.36 billion, they only managed to hit $3.30 billion dollars, which is a 1% rise on last year. Reuters attributes the miss to depressed ad sales due to a dispute between CBS and AT&T earlier this year, which took CBS content off DirecTV and AT&T U-verse services while the companies negotiated a new carriage agreement. More than 6.5 million customers were affected across the United States.

While the piece says that advertising revenue overall was down 6.8% on the year, or about $1.2 billion, that was offset by a similar increase in affiliate revenue, which comes from content distributed by third parties.

CBS is now gearing up for its merger with Viacom, which is expected to be completed in the next month or so. When that happens, the combined company will hold the largest share of TV viewership in America.