The Sunday before election day, NBCUniversal had corporate synergies in full swing.

30 Rockefeller Plaza played home — at least for a day — to the long-running public affairs show Meet the presswith moderator Kristen Welker grilling Sen. Raphael Warnock and Gov. Doug Burgum.

She was also joined by her colleagues to kick off the election: Steve Kornacki worked the interactive “Big Board” and explained the votes, and during the panel discussion, MSNBC host Jen Psaki served as the liberal voice.

It was synergy that may never happen again, if NBCU’s parent company Comcast successfully separating its cable channels from the rest of its media assets.

The cable giant said Wednesday it plans to officially move forward with its proposed split, which will see MSNBC, CNBC, E!, Syfy, USA, Oxygen, Golf Channel, Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes spun off into its own company, which will be led by by Mark Lazarus.

But the SpinCo deal brings with it a host of complications, and executives seem to have few answers for them right now. What happens after the split is complete could reshape the channels – and the TV industry as a whole.

Nowhere are the issues more pressing than on Comcast’s cable news channels MSNBC and CNBC. An MSNBC source described the mood at the network as “depressed,” while a CNBC source described the mood as “annoyed, but probably good.”

It’s a dynamic that makes sense. MSNBC has benefited enormously from its close ties to NBC News, with its own talent gaining broadcast exposure and many NBC anchors filling time on the cable channel. MSNBC has relied on the tremendous reporting capabilities of NBC News, which it has supplemented with its own, more opinion-driven programming.

CNBC, meanwhile, has long operated with a high degree of autonomy. Its executive offices, newsroom and studios are located in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey (it has satellite studios at the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq), and it was only since Cesar Conde took over NBCUniversal News Group in 2020 that CNBC resources had begun to integrate with it larger news operations.

Staff there are unsure of what’s to come (expect no more discounted theme park vacations) but are more confident in their ability to operate outside the larger NBCU enterprise. CNBC began reporting on Lazarus yesterday and got a head start on the new structure.

Lazarus met with top talent at MSNBC on Wednesday, along with MSNBC president Rashida Jones, according to a source familiar with the company. Lazarus was optimistic but acknowledged the complexity and uncertainty of the deal, some of which will come very close to MSNBC’s identity.

Consider: Will the channel continue to be called MSNBC? Will it still be able to use the Peacock badge? Will the channel break a financial deal with NBC News to continue using its reporting, or will it pursue other options? These are big questions without clear answers, and especially on MSNBC, the devil will be in the details.

In a memo to NBCUniversal staff after the deal was announced, Comcast President Mike Cavanagh framed the new company in the context of news, sports and entertainment. USA and the Golf Channel, he wrote, will be the home of sports, with rights to WWE, NASCAR, the Premier League, golf, college basketball and the Olympics.

But will they really come?

NBCUniversal holds those rights, and while the companies are almost certain to reach some sort of deal to continue allowing those sports to appear on cable channels, the spinoff also creates some significant long-term uncertainty about whether SpinCo will continue those rights next time NBCU renews them … or if it looks to acquire rights of its own.

Rick Cordella, the president of NBC Sports, said at a Sports Business Journal conference just hours after the deal was implicated that the deal “is probably just a microcosm of our larger industry … when NBCU was first bought by Comcast, (the cable channels) were the crown jewel, and now we’re looking at things a little differently in this fragmented media world which we find ourselves in.”

Like Lazarus, Cordella had few details on how the split would work, something NBC’s sports rights partners are likely eager to hear more about.

“I can’t speak to all the logistics of how all this will happen, but from a sports perspective, the partners that we have on cable assets like Golf Channel and USA, we will fulfill every commitment, every promise we made to them,” added he.

Golf Channel, it’s worth noting, is similar to CNBC in that it used to operate independently in Orlando before integrating with NBC Sports in 2021. Perhaps it will move back south in the spinoff.

But one sports source speculated that the new company could become a sports player itself and seek any new rights it can to amass, given what could be a short shelf life for the legacy NBC sports content.

The new SpinCo will have plenty of entertainment, with USA, E!, Oxygen and Syfy all in the space to varying degrees. NBCU was in the process of creating more scripted awards on USA when the deal was announced.

But there’s no doubt that in recent years, the bulk of NBCU’s entertainment investment has gone to Peacock, NBC’s broadcast network and, to a lesser extent, Bravo, where the cable channels have done what they could with fewer resources.

Will the new structure allow them to make more entertainment investments? Possibly. It can also allow them to be buyers from more producers, giving them choice. The stand-alone company could also likely cut its own streaming deals and allow it to license its own entertainment to other streaming platforms. But cable just isn’t the home of entertainment anymore, as NBCU’s own actions show. Costumes was a hit in the US, but it became a phenomenon on Netflix. However, the company’s upcoming spinoff will air live on NBC and Peacock, leaving the US in the lurch.

One quirk of the deal: NBCU retains a lone cable channel: Bravo.

It makes sense. Bravo has created arguably the strongest brand in the company’s cable portfolio, with its reality shows generating not only significant TV viewers, but ratings on the Peacock as well. If any brand was going to survive the move to streaming in the enterprise, it would be Bravo.

But the deal raises questions about how long the Bravo cable channel will survive, or whether NBCU wants to move faster to integrate it into Peacock (or, for that matter, NBC, where Bravo-branded programming can live).

While Bravo will have the NBC network to help it retain carriage (more on that below), it will be left without its cable channel siblings in the larger portfolio (putting aside the Telemundo channels, with that business remaining intact).

There is no question that NBCU’s cable channels benefited from being affiliated with NBC’s broadcast network. When distribution deals come up, NBC is about as must-have as it gets, and the company had the option of continuing to carry the rest of its channels.

This deal breaks that tie and will force the SpinCo channels to negotiate for themselves, without the NBC hammer.

As S&P Global Market Intelligence analyst Scott Robson notes, Comcast has arguably been more aggressive in the cable space than any of its competitors in acknowledging the business’s challenging economics.

“Comcast has been more aggressive than any other media company in shutting down basic cable networks over the years, shutting down 7 networks since 2015,” said Robson. “As a result, it is not particularly surprising that Comcast is spinning off cable networks. Cable networks are more vulnerable to future declines than broadcast networks due to the contraction of the pay-TV universe.”

S&P estimates that next year the major channels, including USA, Bravo, E!, MSNBC and Syfy, will be in about 60 million homes, and others such as CNBC and Oxygen in slightly fewer. But which channels will be the tentpoles of the spinoff? USA? If so, how much leverage will it actually have in the talks?

Consolidation is the biggest issue of all.

Comcast is making no bones about what it sees the new company doing, and Cavanagh notes that SpinCo will be able to “play bad” and serve “as a potential partner and acquirer of other complementary media companies.”

Immediately, the buzz in Hollywood focused on Paramount, where new leadership will take over in the new year, with great interest in the Paramount studio, streaming and CBS, but less enthusiasm for cable television brands such as MTV and Comedy Central.

Independent brands such as AMC Networks or Hallmark will also come to mind, as will Warner Bros. Discovery’s suite of channels, though executives there seem laser-focused on executing their strategy or seeking a bigger deal.

Comcast’s spin will set in motion big changes that aren’t quite ready yet, but it’s almost certain they will be long-awaited roll-up vehicles for the industry. The only question is who is in and who is out.