Top M&A predictions for telco and media in 2019

2018 has been a year of transformation in the telecom and media industries.

Telco behemoths snatched up media and ad tech in an effort to compete against the Silicon Valley giants. Digital upstarts like Netflix or YouTube threaten cable-TV viewership and subscriber counts while the Facebook-Google duopoly has a chokehold on digital advertising.

What followed in 2018 were megadeals and industry-reckoning antitrust decisions by the DOJ.

AT&T scooped up Time Warner and AppNexus. Disney acquired 21st Century Fox and Comcast picked up Sky.

Those deals totaled nearly $200 billion.

Now, those companies have to hunker down and integrate those businesses. The execs running the businesses know as much. "You will work very hard, and this next year will - my wife hates it when I say this - will feel like childbirth," newly-promoted WarnerMedia CEO John Stankey told HBO employees after the AT&T-Time Warner merger closed.

"If 2018 was the year where they focused on their future income statement, 2019 has to be the year where they focus on their balance sheet and make sure that they're strong enough to go compete against companies like the big tech platforms who live and die by their ability to acquire customers and integrate them into some kind of platform structure," Todd Klein, a partner at VC firm Revolution, told Business Insider.

But there's more M&A to come in the media and telco industries in 2019, analysts and investment banking experts told Business Insider. Here are the companies and sectors they'll be watching most closely in 2019.