Paramount Announces Intention to Merge HBO MAX with Paramount+ For Their Warner Bros Discovery Acquisition

As noted before, Warner Bros Discovery has been seeking a sale of their company that initially resulted in Netflix being announced as having the winning bid for it. Paramount Skydance launching a hostile takeover bid to acquire WBD in response this past December and later gave a new enhanced “superior” offer earlier this month in their latest attempt to prevent the sale of WBD to Netflix and acquire the company themselves. WBD had announced earlier this week that Paramount now had the superior bid and Netflix declined to raise their offer in response. Paramount announced their acquisition deal for WBD afterwards. WBD is the current media broadcast partner of AEW.

Variety reported that Paramount currently intends to merge WBD’s HBO MAX with their Paramount+ to create a new combined streaming service for the company.

It reported that this announcement was made by CEO David Ellison during an investor’s call earlier today.

“We will combine the streaming portfolios of the two companies into one stronger platform over the coming years.  there are more than 200 million subscribers today, and more than 100 countries and territories worldwide, positioning us to compete effectively with the leading streaming services in today’s marketplace.

As we said, we do plan to put the two services together, which today gives us a little over 200 million direct to consumer subscribers.  We think that really positions us to compete with the leaders in the space. At Paramount, by the middle of this year, we’ll have completed the consolidation of our three services under one unified stack, and you can see us taking a similar approach to this platform going forward. And we think the combined offering, and given the amount of content and what we can do from the tech side, really will put us in a position to be able to compete with the most scaled players in [Direct to Consumer].”

No other details were given regarding this new combined streaming service in regards to pricing nor what it would be named.

HBO MAX currently has around 131.6 million subscribers while Paramout+ currently has around 79 million subscribers as of last week fiscal reports releases from both WBD and Paramount.