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Recently, Third Point’s Dan Loeb wrote a letter to Disney management after taking a position in the company, and Liberty Media’s John Malone gave an abbreviated interview to Ben Mullin of The New York Times.

From the PARQOR perspective, I think both Malone and Loeb are getting a core element of the emerging streaming marketplace wrong. But what does “wrong” mean in the context of critiquing (1) one of the most successful cable and media executives, ever, and (2) one of the more successful activist investors in the market?

There is an inherent danger of calling something “wrong” at a time when Netflix - the streaming market leader pioneer - is reorienting itself towards bets on gaming and advertising, and actively redefining what was the “right” path forward.  Beyond Netflix, there never really has been a market paradigm for “right”.

A core objective of PARQOR is to suss out the signals for what “right” may look like if and when it emerges during or after the “streaming wars": Whether a business has the “right” business model to (PARQOR Hypothesis framework) or the “right” executives helming the ship (Fiduciary vs. Visionary framework) or the “right” priorities for shareholders (Curse of the Mogul framework).

As I wrote last week, "right" is increasingly defined as "profitability and customer retention—and in particular how much value these companies can extract from said customers along the way." Loeb's proposed strategy is closer to being "right" than Malone's in this point, but even he gets operational and technological details wrong.