Premium cabler Starz is reorienting itself in its post-Lionsgate era and making a notable round of layoffs.
The company cut 7 percent of its workforce on Friday in what has been described as a shifting of resources across the Jeffrey Hirsch-led company. In its latest 10-K filing as of last June, Starz had 541 employees, which means the latest round of layoffs is impacting less than 40 staffers.
The company, vulnerable to cord-cutting and a decline in linear TV households, has embarked on an expansion effort pitching itself to Wall Street as a pure-play streaming brand.
Up until ten months ago, it had been housed as part of Lionsgate since the Jon Feltheimer-led studio made a $4.4 billion cash and stock deal in 2016 to acquire Starz with an eye toward growing its own subscription-based business. Lionsgate had doubled down on the Starz brand when it sold its 31 percent stake in premium channel Epix to MGM for $397.1 million.
But the companies had mulled a split during the pandemic years and completed a formal spinoff last year. The network, with offices in Santa Monica, New York and Englewood, Colorado, boasts franchises like Outlander, which returned for its eighth season this year, and Power, a five-season crime drama that launched multiple spinoffs.
The company ended 2025 with 12.7 million OTT subscribers, growth of 7.6 percent year-over-year. (Starz will be stopping reporting subscribers in its future earnings updates.) “We deliver edgy, premium content for women and underrepresented audiences that broad-based streamers don’t address,” Hirsch said on a Feb. 27 earnings call. “Content remains core to everything we do.”
Hirsch addressed the process of untangling Starz from Lionsgate on the call, saying, “we’ve spent several quarters unwinding some of the legacy constraints of operating within a studio. We believe this has set up the business to drive strong cash flow generation going forward, with 2026 functioning as an inflection point.”
Part of that includes cutting content spend this year, CFO Scott MacDonald had said on the call with analysts in February. The exec noted, “The improvement in cash flow stems from lower cash content spend in 2026 versus 2025, which drives a closer alignment of cash content spend with the programming amortization expense reflected on our income statement.”
Read the full article here
