HBO Max and Paramount+ will eventually become one streaming service, though they’ll stay separate for now, according to David Ellison, CEO of their new parent company, Skydance.
Speaking at a press conference at the Paramount lot marking the close of the merger between Paramount and HBO Max’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, Ellison said the two services will run independently in the short term, possibly bundled together, before being folded into a single product.
“Long-term, the plan is basically to bring them together. It’ll take a period of time to do that. So, I think in the immediate [term], you will see them operated separately, with things like bundling or things that you’ll be able to see accelerated in the relatively short term. I can’t be specific about that yet today,” Ellison explained.
When the mega-merger was first announced seven months ago, leadership pointed toward combining the two platforms into a single direct-to-consumer giant. But with the transaction now officially finalized, Ellison offered a more measured roadmap, clarifying that an immediate app consolidation is off the table in favor of an interim bundling strategy.
In a statement announcing the deal’s closing, the Skydance CEO said, “Today is a historic day, not just for Skydance but for our entire industry. From the start, our ambition was to bring these two storied studios together and create a stronger competitor, with the talent, resources, and reach to tell great stories in every genre, on every platform, for audiences everywhere.”
Merging streaming services has proven tricky for other companies. Disney has slowly been turning Disney+ into its main platform, with Hulu programming showing up there behind a tile on the home screen.
Warner Bros. Discovery itself went through a rocky version of this. After WarnerMedia and Discovery merged in 2022, executives planned to fold Discovery+ into HBO Max under a new name, Max. They backed away from that after finding strong demand for the cheaper Discovery+ on its own. The Max rebrand was also reversed two years later following confusion among viewers and partners.