| Thanks for reading The Briefing, our nightly column where we break down the day's news. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe to our reporting here. Greetings! Dealmaking in 2025 is off to a good start. Walt Disney's deal on Monday to offload its Hulu+Live TV business—the clunky name for the part of Hulu that offers a cable TV–like package of old-fashioned TV channels—to smaller rival FuboTV is a smart move. Disney comes out of the transaction with 70% of a larger FuboTV, one that is making money and arguably better positioned to both compete and eventually be swallowed up by someone else. (YouTube, for instance—another player in this market—could be a buyer—for more on that idea, see below.) Separately, Uber announced a $1.5 billion accelerated share buyback, most of which it completed today in a transaction with Bank of America. This is also smart: Uber's stock price fell 30% in the fourth quarter from a high of around $86 to just above $60 on Dec. 31, where it started the year. Uber had announced a $7 billion buyback last February, but it only spent about $700 million of that through September, perhaps because the stock was on the upswing for much of the year. The dumbest thing companies can do is spend stock buyback money when their shares are expensive or already rallying. But it makes a lot of sense to do a big chunk of a buyback when the stock is low, as Uber shares are now. Do these two smart deals presage more intelligent dealmaking in 2025? Don't bet on it. But hey, when we see thoughtfully done deals, we should acknowledge them as such. FuboTV investors are surely a lot happier today than they were last week, when the stock was trading as low as $1.25. Today, in the wake of the news that Disney is buying control of the company, FuboTV shares closed above $5. That's still a long way short of its $10 IPO price from 2020, mind you. But at least there's a path now for FuboTV shareholders to make money on their investment. That's because there's a much greater chance now that FuboTV gets bought in its entirety. Until now, the company has struggled as a tiny entrant in the difficult business of selling packages of cable TV channels in competition with Hulu+Live TV, YouTube TV and traditional cable operators. Cord cutting has been slowly killing the cable and satellite firms. The streaming entrants such as Hulu+Live TV, Fubo and YouTube have spent the past few years trying to steal those firms' remaining customers with lower prices and digital extras. But even for the streaming folks, life is difficult. Part of the problem is that their smaller size gives them less ability to negotiate lower programming costs, which is why consolidation is so important. The Disney deal more than doubles FuboTV's size: Disney is putting its Hulu+Live TV business into Fubo in exchange for control of the company. FuboTV will emerge with 6.2 million subscribers, up from 1.6 million in North America now. By comparison, YouTube TV reported 8 million a year ago, and the two biggest traditional cable TV operators, Comcast and Charter, each have between 12 million and 13 million subscribers. So the gap between these services is closing. What would make sense next is for Google to buy FuboTV: The combination of YouTube TV and FuboTV would have more than 14 million subscribers. Not only would that give YouTube TV more bargaining power, it would insulate the business against the possibility that Charter and Comcast merge their cable operations, creating a behemoth with 25 million subscribers. None other than John Malone, whose Liberty empire is Charter's biggest shareholder, thinks such a deal is a good idea. As we wrote in this story explaining YouTube's strategy with YouTube TV, the company has ambitions to get to 30 million subscribers. Buying FuboTV in a year or two would be one way to get there. • A Google executive on Monday criticized Microsoft's Bing search engine for potentially making users think they are using Google Search rather than Bing (more here). • The Federal Reserve's top banking regulator, Michael Barr, announced he would step down from the position by Feb. 28, a year ahead of schedule. His decision means President-elect Donald Trump will now have the freedom to appoint a new vice chair who may adopt a more favorable stance toward crypto and other financial technologies. • Meta Platforms appointed three new people to its board, including UFC CEO Dana White, Exor CEO John Elkann and technology investor Charlie Songhurst, who previously was a corporate strategy executive at Microsoft. More than 100,000 readers rely on The Information's Creator Economy newsletter for coverage of the creator startups making waves, big tech companies' social media playbooks, and scoops on the sector's biggest hires. Start receiving the free newsletter here. | 
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