Good evening, I’m Dylan Byers.

Welcome back to In The Room, my bi-weekly private email that takes you behind the scenes of the media industry. Tonight, an exclusive scoop on Brian Roberts’ latest M&A play: a proposal to merge NBCUniversal and Electronic Arts that almost came together—and still could, down the line.

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Whether Roberts was too cautious, too late, too difficult, or too smart to land any of these is a matter of debate. He tried hard for Fox and is said to have wanted WarnerMedia. Whether or not he wanted to pursue Activision, he certainly never got around to having serious conversations about it. Whatever the case, the question stands, and remains as pressing as ever—especially as Peacock, NBCUniversal's streaming play, languishes behind its competitors. Though Roberts has said that NBCUniversal doesn’t need mergers and acquisitions to achieve scale, the conventional wisdom among many of his peers and competitors, as well as among a considerable set of investors and analysts, is that, as a matter of fact, everyone does. Moreover, the Roberts family has traditionally been among the most acquisitive in the business...