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May 1, 2020 
By DYLAN BYERS in Los Angeles & AHIZA GARCÍA-HODGES in San Francisco Good morning. 💰 The big takeaway from this week's Q1 earnings is that Q2 is going to be absolutely brutal. Tech and media companies will continue to lose ad revenue; pay TV will continue to lose subscribers; and layoffs, pay cuts and furloughs will accelerate.
• Et tu, Amazon?: "Under normal circumstances, in this coming Q2, we’d expect to make some $4 billion or more in operating profit,” Jeff Bezos says. “Instead, we expect to spend the entirety of that $4 billion, and perhaps a bit more, on Covid-related expenses."
• And we're not done ... Disney, Fox, ViacomCBS, Discovery, T-Mobile, Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts report next week.
🍸 Sign of the times: Pegu Club, the legendary SoHo cocktail bar that helped launch the craft-cocktail movement, is closing its doors for good. Make a Little Italy tonight and pour one out.
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Bloomberg/Getty Starting gate When will sports come back?
Moving the Market: Fifty days after Adam Silver suspended the NBA season, we are starting to see the ever-so-slow return of live sports in contests like racing and golf. We're also starting to see the first inklings of an eventual return of the major sports leagues.
• The big picture: The absence of sports is testing the television industry, which relies on live events for fees and ad revenue. Pay TV is already losing subscribers at a rapid clip. As we wrote in March, a prolonged sports freeze could upend the entire business.
• Networks like ESPN have found lifelines in documentaries like "The Last Dance," which is averaging 6 million viewers per episode, and The NFL Draft, which averaged 15.6 million viewers on its first night. But this is only a temporary stop gap.
Coming attractions:
🏇 The Arkansas Derby, a qualifying race for the Kentucky Derby, will broadcast live this Saturday on NBCSN.
🏎️ NASCAR will resume starting Sunday, May 17, with seven races over an 11-day period on FOX and FS1.
🏌️ The PGA Tour plans to resume in June; the Champions Tour plans to resume on July 31 with 13 events in 15 weeks.
What's next:
🏀 The NBA hopes to re-open training facilities on May 8 but will defer to health officials. It hasn't set a date for resuming games, but LeBron James yesterday indicated that the season will resume.
⚽ The MLS hopes to re-open training facilities on May 15, but will defer to health officials. As of now, all matches have been suspended until at least June 8.
⚾ The MLB is considering a plan to start the season in late June, and no later than July 2. In that scenario, teams would play at least 100 regular-season games.
🏈 The NFL is planning to start on time on Sept. 10 and hold a standard 17-week season. But the league has contingency plans in place to start as late as mid-October.
🏒 The NHL is planning to start in October as usual, though Commissioner Gary Bettman says they have flexibility and could start in November or December if necessary.
Meanwhile, Europe's soccer leagues are taking varied approaches. 🏴 England's Premier League will today discuss a plan to resume the season in June. 🇩🇪 Germany's Bundesliga had hoped to resume games on May 9, but that has been delayed indefinitely.
🇪🇸 Spain's La Liga has said it will start testing players for COVID-19 next week in hopes of resuming the season. 🇮🇹 Italy's Serie A is unlikely to resume, per the nation's sports minister. 🇫🇷 France's Ligue 1 has cancelled its season outright.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Quarantine content What Americans are watching
Talk of TV Land: "Americans have spent significantly more time than usual in front of the TV, gorging on streaming shows, news programs, old sitcoms and video games," NYT's John Koblin reports.
• The big picture: "For the week of April 20, the average viewer spent 38 hours in front of the TV." In late March, the number was even higher at 41 hours.
What we're watching: "Viewers have craved both news programs and escapist fare, splitting their TV time between the likes of Anderson Cooper and Bea Arthur, with one balancing the other."
• "Cable news networks have had ratings records. In April, Fox News and MSNBC had among their highest viewership totals of their 24 years on the air. CNN’s viewership totals have also skyrocketed."
• "A Hulu spokeswoman noted that 'comfort viewing' has been more popular than usual. In April, Hulu viewers watched nearly 11 million hours of the vintage sitcom 'The Golden Girls.'"
What's next: "Viewers have lately been watching the news a bit less. News programming amounted to 19 percent of total TV time during the week of March 16. By April 6, that number was 17.5 percent, according to Nielsen."
👶 Speaking of... 👶
The inimitable Anderson Cooper, our former CNN colleague and one of the truly great people in television news, is now the proud father of Wyatt Morgan Cooper, born Monday.
"I am a dad. I have a son," Cooper announced last night. "As a gay kid, I never thought it would be possible to have a child, and I'm so grateful to everyone who paved the way."
Monica Schipper/Getty Report card Thursday earnings highlights
Street talk: Here are the highlights from Thursday's big earnings reports, with the necessary caveat mentioned at the top of today's note: Q2 will be far worse than Q1.
📦 Amazon revenue grew 26 percent as "the tech giant became an essential shopping destination" due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Recode's Jason Del Rey reports. "But CEO Jeff Bezos warned investors that the company’s profit would suffer over the next few months as it spent billions on... coronavirus-related measures."
🍏 Apple "said that its sales continued to rise and that it was buying back another $50 billion in stock," NYT's Jack Nicas reports. "Apple said it more than compensated for a 7.5 percent decline in revenue in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong with surging sales of ... iPhone apps and Apple Music, as well as the Apple Watch and AirPods."
🐦 Twitter "said ad revenue cratered 27 percent in the last three weeks of March from a year earlier. That decline appears to have continued in April," The Information reports. "It’s a reminder of how Twitter management has fallen short. Will shareholders, particularly activist investor Elliott, be patient?"
📺 Comcast "signed up more broadband customers last quarter than any time in 12 years, but that growth was more than offset by the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on vast portions of its business, from movie production to theme parks," writes WSJ's Lillian Rizzo. (Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News.)
Bloomberg/Getty Reality bites Quibi's diminishing returns
Talk of Tinseltown: Quibi’s app has been downloaded more than 3.1 million times, a company spokeswoman says, but only a million or so have actually registered for the free service, WSJ's Ben Mullin and Sahil Patel report.
• "The real test... is in how many become paying subscribers when free trials end." Quibi "aimed to sign up more than 7 million [paying] subscribers... in its first year and more than 16 million customers in three years," per an internal document.
Bloomberg/Getty State of Work What if we WFH forever?
Futurecasting: "The Covid-19 crisis has forced companies to fully commit to the necessary investments in tech, process and training to make remote work a permanent feature of their businesses," The Information's Sam Lessin writes. "Many companies are not going to return to pre-Covid work patterns."
The implications of that sea change are enormous. ...
• "People are not going to return to going to offices five days a week, which is going to crush commercial real estate and adjacent businesses."
• Remote work will flatten the "competitive curve for jobs, opening opportunity globally and likely lowering wages."
• "To the extent that this period greatly expands the talent pool, then wages should drop, making firms more profitable."
• "Suburbs and cities will likely decline and exurbs will rise. ... We will see new forms of rural living where costs are low and land is abundant, and small towns might become the new social and connective tissue."
The big picture: "The shift from office cultures to truly remote cultures might have been a good idea even pre-Covid. But getting to that end state required organizations to invest an enormous amount up front... for the long-term advantages of remote work."
• "Nearly every company in the world [has now been] forced to make the investment in remote work and overcome the up-front cost. Now that many have paid that cost, there is no going back."
☀️ What's next: The weekend.
See you Monday.
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