After offering better and better deals until Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders finally decided to ditch the Netflix deal, Paramount has the merger it has wanted since WBD went up for sale. There's still a lot of time until the merger is completely finalised, but already Paramount CEO David Ellison has big plans for the two companies to create one massive whole, such as blending Paramount+ with HBO Max.
"We do plan to put the two services together, which today gives us a little over 200 million direct-to-consumer subscribers," said Ellison in a recent investors call (via Variety). "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."
Ellison didn't go into further detail on how the streamers would be combined, and if subscribers would have to pay an increased cost. However, he did comment that HBO will continue to run without heavy oversight from Paramount execs. "We said, we do plan for that to be able to operate with independence, so that HBO can, candidly, do what it does incredibly well. Our viewpoint is HBO should stay HBO. They built a phenomenal brand. They are a leader in the space, and we just want them to continue doing more of it. But by bringing the platforms together, all of our content will be able to reach even a broader audience than we can do standalone," Ellison explained.
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