\n<\/p>\n
Paramount Skydance plans to combine HBO Max and Paramount+ into one streaming service, chief executive David Ellison announced during a call with investors, days after the company said it would acquire HBO parent company Warner Bros Discovery.<\/p>\n
The deal would allow major HBO Max titles, such as The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and Succession, to sit alongside Paramount offerings including Yellowstone and Survivor. Ellison said combining the two platforms would give the company more than 200 million direct-to-consumer subscribers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe think that really positions us to compete with the leaders in the space,\u201d Ellison said.<\/p>\n
Ellison said he wants HBO to \u201coperate with independence\u201d and said CEO Casey Bloys and his team \u201cdo a remarkable job\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur viewpoint is HBO should stay HBO. And they built a phenomenal brand,\u201d Ellison said. When asked, Ellison said that his favorite HBO show is Game of Thrones.<\/p>\n
Paramount executives did not offer details on how subscriptions would be priced or what the new service would be called.<\/p>\n
Paramount and HBO did not immediately respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n
The announcement comes days after Paramount Skydance won the battle to acquire Warner Bros Discovery (WBD), HBO\u2019s parent company, for $110bn after a drawn-out bidding war with Netflix, which capped its offer at $82.7bn.<\/p>\n
Though Ellison expressed confidence the deal would not face problems with regulators, the merger still faces possible hurdles and a backlash from critics worried about increasing media consolidation.<\/p>\n
If the deal goes through, HBO Max, along with Warner BrosStudios and CNN, would join Paramount Skydance\u2019s slate of existing brands, including CBS, Paramount Pictures and Showtime.<\/p>\n
Critics of the merger have raised concerns over possible censorship and political bias given Ellison\u2019s close relationship with Trump, who gave the green light to the merger between Ellison\u2019s Skydance Media and Paramount last summer.<\/p>\n
Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren \u2013 who was also critical of Netflix\u2019s bid for WBD \u2013 told the Guardian last week that the Paramount-WBD deal is \u201can antitrust disaster threatening higher prices and fewer choices for American families\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cA handful of Trump-aligned billionaires are trying to seize control of what you watch and charge you whatever price they want,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Concerns over the future of CNN have also been raised, given the recent shakeups at CBS News. Bari Weiss, the conservative commentator turned media entrepreneur, has faced multiple controversies as CBS News\u2019s editor-in-chief since she was appointed last October.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Paramount Skydance plans to combine HBO Max and Paramount+ into one streaming service, chief executive David Ellison announced during a call with investors, days after the company said it would acquire HBO parent company Warner Bros Discovery. The deal would allow major HBO Max titles, such as The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and Succession,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45650,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[4696,10920,1545,287,4849,745,2781,1779],"class_list":{"0":"post-45649","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-ellison","9":"tag-hbo","10":"tag-industry","11":"tag-max","12":"tag-paramount","13":"tag-service","14":"tag-streaming","15":"tag-television"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/45650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}