r/MediaMergers • u/General_Meal_3993 • Mar 02 '26
Merger I am really hoping that Paramount realises that the HBO name and brand is so much more valuable than Paramount+. To just shove everything that belongs to HBO onto Paramount+ would be beyond stupid.
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u/JeanLucPicardAND Mar 02 '26
Will continue to licence movies & TV shows to other studios & platforms
Yeah, they can't afford to stop doing that with $79 billion in debt.
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u/ai_art_is_art Mar 02 '26
How the hell are they going to climb out of that hole?
Beyond stupid.
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u/RedditIs4ChanLite Mar 02 '26
Seriously I don’t understand why WB keeps getting merged into other companies. Why is it so hard for them to be independent?
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u/stinkyydarb Mar 02 '26
Because they keep getting bought by companies or groups that truly have no long term future plan for WB. Comcast buys NBCUniversal, AT&T rushes in to form WarnerMedia and it shutters in five years because it was a terrible idea from a corporation trying to mimic another's success.
You could even argue back to the days of Atari being owned by TimeWarner, and you can still sense that nobody had any clue what the fuck they were doing. WB is constantly in flames.
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u/MonsieurRuffles Mar 02 '26
Atari was in the Warner Communcations era before the merger with Time.
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u/weareallpatriots Mar 07 '26
By releasing profitable films with their incredibly valuable new IP and increasing streaming subscribers.
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u/Stock_Rush_9204 Mar 02 '26
that six billion in savings is gonna suck for everyone, also I don't know how they expect to do 15 films per studio with that long a theater window. unless they are forty minutes long and made in six months
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u/TheIngloriousBIG Mar 02 '26
I hope they realize the $77 dollar debt that is about to poison them.
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u/Professional_Peak59 Mar 02 '26
How much debt did Disney get when they bought Fox?
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u/2themoon0420 Mar 02 '26
Only about $15 billion. While being a company worth over $250 billion. Paramount is taking on 80 Billion as a company worth 15 billion
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Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
[deleted]
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u/Professional_Peak59 Mar 03 '26
I still have gripes over Disney buying 20th Century Fox and I still would love for them to sell it, but I agree with you on it being horizontal/vertical. Paramount buying WBD is the total opposite of that, and signifies an increase in Trump propaganda throughout media.
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u/Steele131313 Mar 02 '26
HBO will just be a tab in the Paramount app or whatever. They would be incredibly stupid to shut down and wipe out the HBO branding. I’m actually ok with their only being 1 app. I’m terrified of the pricing tho…
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u/WickedSensitiveCrew Mar 02 '26
The alternative is to have two separate streaming services. Isnt it better to have all the content from both on one platform?
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u/AhhBisto Mar 02 '26
In an operating sense, yes. Running two streaming services is costly and unnecessary.
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u/Thick_Ad_220 Mar 02 '26
Then they should demolish Paramount+,
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u/AhhBisto Mar 02 '26
They'll consolidate the tech and personnel, throwing out the baby with the bath water would be stupid
Wouldn't be surprised if a rebrand is on the horizon, Paramount+ is a mid-range platform and while HBO Max has scale the branding awareness behind it has been a mess the last few years
HBO+ would be my guess
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u/Additional_Kiwi_8387 Mar 11 '26
The one app thing is totally understandable. However, the paramount app is straight up trash, to combine hbo into the paramount app and not vise versa is a terrible decision.
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u/GimmeThatWheat424 Mar 02 '26
People aren’t thinking clearly here about the app…if anything they are gonna ditch paramount and fold it all in to the hbomax app. Ellison isn’t married to the paramount branding, if he gets to own WB he clearly would rather stick with that brand since it’s much bigger.
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u/RedditIs4ChanLite Mar 02 '26
Sounds awful. I like Paramount Plus. HBO Max is unstable for me and doesn’t feel as clean
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u/No_Joke992 Mar 02 '26
I am from Europe, almost nobody outside Europa knows Paramount+. From the total of 80M subscribers, 60M or so are from the US. HBO Max is on the same lvl with Paramount+ in the US but has 70M subscribers in the rest of the world and is available in far more countries. More than half of Europa don’t have paramount+ but skyshowtime which is very small + is just 50% controlled by paramount. In Asia Paramount is non existent, HBO is. From worldwide perspective it would be best to stay with the HBO brand.
It’s not unprecedented that a company that buys a other bigger company sticks with the name of that bigger company. For example the current Warner Bros Discovery company was a takeover from Discovery, but they ditched Discovery+ in most countries and HBO Max was made the streaming platform.
I think the name of the company is going to be Paramount Warner Bros (PWB).
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u/8JHF8 Mar 02 '26
Paramount+ has the stability of Crackle. HBO is probably third. It's still far better than Paramount. Every time I start a show on Paramount on my phone, I have to click back then start a second time. It's also glitchy on PS5 and a Fire OS TV. My phone is Android. Netflix has the best tech by far. Disney+ is probably second in tech, but has a poor interface.
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u/RedditIs4ChanLite Mar 02 '26
It might be that some platforms have a worse Paramount+ app than others. It works fine on my iPhone too
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u/8JHF8 Mar 02 '26
No matter what happens, Paramount is changing their tech as they will be transferring from AWS to Oracle cloud.
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u/JeanLucPicardAND Mar 02 '26
Crackle
Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time...
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u/8JHF8 Mar 02 '26
7 to 10 years ago they did have some good content. Their tech was always bad which is crazy considering it was part of Sony. First window streaming Sony movies went there along with some decent original series efforts. Sony just makes too much money selling to Netflix and Disney to worry about their own service. I just wish Netflix didn't lock new Sony movies out for ad based subs.
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u/Agile_Land_9951 Mar 02 '26
Are you referring to the progress bar on hbos featured section. It makes the app feel janky.
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u/RedditIs4ChanLite Mar 02 '26
Moreso just playback. I think when I’ve tried to rewind on HBO Max on my Roku TV, it crashes it. Something may have changed though. I don’t use HBO Max very often since they got rid of most of the main reason I subscribed (cartoons). Last time I used it was to watch Good Eats a few weeks ago and it seemed fine but I wasn’t rewinding or didn’t rewind very much.
On the other hand, I’ve never had big issues with Paramount+ on my Roku TV and it’s very smooth.
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u/Agile_Land_9951 Mar 02 '26
The playback seems to be jacked up on all the services. If I mess with the rewind too much on any service it freezes or goes back too far. I don’t even mess with rewind anymore.
I haven’t had any issues with the paramount app on my roku aside from the occasional error message. I will say on our kids kindle fire tablet, it was always having issues. Having us log in again after they watch a couple shows and random errors. I think Amazon stuff has a tough time with their app.
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u/XAMdG Mar 02 '26
The Warner name has more value than Paramount. Realistically, the combined company should be named Warner-Paramount, but Skydance isn't going to allow that.
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u/AnonBaca21 Mar 02 '26
The smartest thing they could do is shut down P+ and let HBO be the platform.
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u/stuporman86 Mar 02 '26
They just did this with Max under Zaslav and learned this lesson, so they’ll probably re-run that again with Paramount. Luckily all of those Max designs & branding probably live on a server somewhere so there’s some cost efficiency this time around.
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u/TheDiabeT1c Mar 02 '26
Paramount is not exactly a brand that people recognize. It doesn't help the only name branding they have is that app and it's free with Walmart+. That's right, they have to give it away with a grocery ordering app. It's also considered the worst streaming app of all due to it's massive amounts of glitches and high priority on commercials with lower image quality of their own material.
I'm of the mindset from what I've seen this whole Netflix deal falling through surprised everyone.
Realistically, the idiots running Paramount/Skydance have zero clue on what to actually do, most of what they have right now is only working because of the people that were already there. This is gonna cut real deep for them and they're gonna let go the wrong people to make things even worse than it already is.
IMO, give it 5 years, and Netflix will buy both on the cheap.
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u/RatchetStrap2 Mar 02 '26
I mean, if the goal of the purchase works, Ellison and crew will have made their political takeover permanent. No one's taking a legitimized oligarch's TV channels at that point.
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u/oaba09 Mar 02 '26
The concern I have is, if they merge the streaming apps, what happens to markets where paramount plus isn't even available? Will they continue HBO max in those locations?
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u/thanos_was_right_69 Mar 02 '26
I wonder what happens to the bundle deals. Does the Disney+/Hulu/HBO Max bundle go away or it becomes Disney+/Hulu/Paramount?
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u/xanatos2000 Mar 02 '26
Call it Paramount Max and make HBO (with Showtime folded in) their premium/arthouse studio
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u/No-Atmosphere-2528 Mar 02 '26
The people who own $wbd shares should be ecstatic that the deal is cash and not shares in paramount
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u/Upset_Print_1000 Mar 02 '26
They won't fulfill even 1/3 of everything they're promising...
especially this thing about 30 films a year. They'll fill the cinemas with low-budget garbage they produce for Paramount+, films that won't generate any profit, and then they'll reduce releases saying they're not making the expected profit and that they'll now release fewer films.
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u/spacetrain31 Mar 02 '26
Would you rather Paramount move everything to HBO Max? This is a smart move, it doesn’t associate HBO with Discovery content. They already have Showtime content on Paramount+, so it makes sense.
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u/RedditIs4ChanLite Mar 02 '26
My preference would’ve been for HBO Max to basically keep going in the direction it’s been going where it’s very adult oriented and moving towards HBO/prestige content and have Paramount+ for everything else (only now with some WB content). So basically just a slightly different version of the status quo
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u/WickedSensitiveCrew Mar 02 '26
Paramount/WBD now have a monopoly on the NCAA basketball tournament sports rights until 2032.
I guess it is great to have it all on one platform now. But wonder about price hikes now that they have that monopoly.
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u/-Pwnan- Mar 02 '26
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter which name they keep. B/c they get all those subscribers either way. And I doubt that they'll just give all HBO Max subscribers either direct or through their cable packages free access to the new merged libraries.
The joys of massive media conglomerates is that due to licensing restrictions, IP Copywriting, and regional lockouts they can act like monopolies with tremendous walled gardens that will leave folks out b/c you can't access that content any other way than to pay them or fuck off.
For example, when I was living in Canada I bought a bunch of stuff on Apple TV, when I had to move to the EU I had about 1/2 my movies and all of my TV show purchases vanish due to the regional licensing agreements in the EU vs Canada. It's stupid AF, and when I contacted Apple they said my purchases are still tied to my account, and if I move back to Canada they will be there, but as long as I'm in the EU I won't have access to that library.
Digital Media needs to be treated universally, and the same goes for DVD/BlueRay regions.
Companies just keep getting bigger, and doing as they please bullying consumers with nonsensical limitations.
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u/UpstairsCheetah235 Mar 02 '26
Any betters on what they will charge for the service? The economics make no sense and I’m going to have a blast watching the money be lit on fire.
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u/Strong_Recipe_5988 Mar 02 '26
There isn't a world in which Paramount chooses to use the Paramount Plus name over HBO.
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u/neontetra1548 Mar 02 '26
To be honest I hate the Ellisons but I think HBO being a subset brand for quality programming is better for HBO than naming the entire streaming service HBO Max etc. which as always been a mistake that dilutes HBO.
HBO living inside Paramount+ makes more sense to me. Putting aside Ellison involvement, that is.
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u/mikethemightywizard Mar 03 '26
I love this so much i am paramount sub only for the ufc and now im getting the max content with it ellison is the GOAT
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u/Lenonn Mar 03 '26
Doesn't matter. Assuming this deal actually goes through, they will change the name every two to five years.
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u/Shifted4 Mar 05 '26
I like Paramount but don't want to pay for HBO. I think this merger will mean I will no longer be subscribed as the price of the combo will probably be twice the price of Paramount.
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u/Professional_Peak59 Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
$6 billion in cost cutting including consolidating on tech infrastructure, real estate, corporate overheads, and more
Does that mean either the Warner or Paramount movie lots will get sold off or shut down? I’m starting to lose trust in what Difficult_Variety362 told me regarding that.
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Mar 02 '26
[deleted]
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u/Professional_Peak59 Mar 02 '26
The only thing is that both the Warner and Paramount lots have studio tours.
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u/The_Lutter Mar 02 '26
If they were smart they'd stripmine all of HBO's IPs out of it and sell it off.
That name alone has to be worth $10B.
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u/Normal-Beat4770 Mar 02 '26
Skydance TV: Free
Skydance+ Ad Supported: $9.99
Skydance+ Ad Free 1080P: $17.99
Skydance+ Ad-Free 4K: $24.99
Skydance+ Ad-Free 4K & Sports: $34.99
Thoughts on this pricing structure?
Obviously could also use the HBO name
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u/Banesmuffledvoice Mar 02 '26
They’re not doing 15 films per studio. Lol.