Billionaire Investor Mario Gabelli joined Yahoo Finance's Myles Udland, Andy Serwer, Dan Roberts, and Melody Hahm to discuss his outlook for the media industry amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Video Transcript

ANDY SERWER: Hey, Mario, Andy Serwer here. I want-- sorry to jump in. I just want to ask you about streaming entertainment, TV, Hollywood because you are the media maestro investor of all time. But here's the thing.

You know, we were talking about peak content just a couple of months ago. And, now, are we going to be looking at trough content, you know, going into 2020-21 because there's no production going on? Are we going to run out of content?

MARIO GABELLI: Well, you have a lot of stuff that was put in the pipeline, like classic films, that would have been enormous box office successes. You know, Tom Cruise had one, some of the Disney movies. They've all been pushed forward.

I just talked to a movie theater operator today. And, you know, how are they going to position themselves? They have an ability to the space everyone six seats apart. And how much of that is going to come back?

And China, which is 40-- the US box office, Andy, was $42 billion last year, $10 billion in China. They just shut the theatres down. Now that's going to come back slowly.

I mean, we have an office in Shanghai. We have an office in Hong Kong. And they give us an update of traffic patterns and what people are doing. So there will be a gap in creative content. Netflix mentioned that anybody reading the "Hollywood Reporter", "Variety" knows that. And that's a reality of the dynamics that we're facing.

Independent of that, who's got the library? And who's got some content? And how do they keep it fresh? Well, Sony, which has a great music-- what are they going to do with their film entertainment business?

Will they now look to find Tencent to do something? Will they do something with Alibaba? Will they do something with the companies in China? Or will they do something with the companies up in Seattle? Will Amazon say, hey, listen, let's do a deal where we put it together with Paramount?

You saw that in streaming in the music world. Today, John Malone and Greg Maffei put together a transaction which is classic, you know, quilting together their Formula One entity and shifting Live Nation over to Liberty Sirius. Liberty Sirius also has a great-- they own Sirius. They're trying to figure out what they do with Pandora.

So streaming music is up sharply. That helps companies like Vivendi, where they sold 10% of it to Tencent for a very interesting market cap. Will Sony do something like that?