You’ve likely heard about WarnerMedia and Discovery merging, and while the merger is just about official, as it closed over the weekend. We still don’t know everything about what to expect from this combined company – which is being called Warner Bros Discovery.
WarnerMedia and Discovery announced this merger almost a year ago, which would combine HBO MAX and Discovery+. That would make it the second largest streaming service behind Netflix. AT&T sold WarnerMedia, as part of its ongoing efforts to get out of the TV-making business. It also sold DIRECTV last year. It’s interesting, after spending all that money to buy Time Warner, it has now sold almost all of it.
So what’s going to happen to HBO MAX, Discovery+ and even the newly launched CNN+? Well, in this article, we’re going to go over everything that we know right now and aim to answer all of those questions. This will be updated as we learn more, of course.
What content does this merged company (Warner Bros Discovery) own?
WarnerMedia already had Warner Bros Pictures, along with HBO, CN, TNT, TBS, TruTV and DC Comics. Discovery brings a lot of reality shows to the table with its ownership of Discovery, Animal Planet, HGTV, Magnolia Network, OWN, TLC and the Travel Channel.
That’s quite a bit of content that will be available under this merged company. And together, they’ll have content for everyone here.
Will HBO MAX and Discovery+ be merged or bundled?
Yes. But not right now.
Discovery’s CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels said that HBO MAX and Discovery+ will be bundled and then eventually merged into a single app. However, at this time, there is no word or timeline on when that will happen. However, bundling is likely to happen very soon. Which is being seen as a sort of band-aid while customers wait for the combined service to roll out.
HBO MAX’s EVP for Global Product Management, Sarah Lyons has said that the performance of its app is very important. So migrating Discovery+ content over, or HBO MAX content over to Discovery+, may not be as simple as flipping on a switch.
Don’t forget, that this new company also gets You.i. Which is a company that helps companies deliver video content across mobile, tablet, game consoles, streaming devices, set-top boxes and Smart TVs. When HBO migrated from HBO Go to HBO MAX a few years ago, it did it with You.i technology. So it’s likely it’ll be used again to migrate HBO MAX and Discovery+ together.
What will happen with CNN+?
Then there’s CNN+, which launched just last month. It’s a compliment to the cable news network channel, and not a full-on news streaming service. It’s unclear what Warner Bros Discovery plans to do with it just yet. After all, it is only a few weeks old at this point. So it’s likely that executives over at Warner Bros Discovery are giving it some time to get its footing together.
The launch of CNN+ was pretty lackluster, but that hasn’t fazed the company. As Warner Bros Discovery believes that as cable subscriptions start to become smaller in the US, it’s important to have an established streaming brand for news. People are still going to need to get their news, so having CNN+ available is going to be important. It’ll likely pick up next year and the year after as we head into the 2024 US Presidential Election. The election years are typically the biggest years for ratings and revenue for cable networks like CNN.
CNN isn’t the first news network to go streaming, there’s also Fox Nation and NewsMax. Not to mention MSNBC is available on Peacock. CNN is still the most trusted cable news network right now.
So what’s going to happen to my favorite content?
Insert shrug emoji. No one really knows. Obviously content that is already available on HBO MAX, Discovery+ and CNN+ won’t be going away. But which service it is housed on may change. And perhaps, more importantly, what content gets made in the future, is up in the air right now.
Last week, Discovery announced the leadership team that will make up Warner Bros Discovery, and unsurprisingly, it’s mostly Discovery executives. There are a few exceptions though, as Casey Bloys will maintain oversight of HBO MAX, and Channing Dungey will continue as chairman of Warner Bros Television Group. In addition to that, Toby Emmerich will remain as the chairman of Warner Bros Pictures Group.
We could be expecting some changes with content however. As Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who will become CEO of the new combined company, stated that their goal is “to compete with the leading streaming services, not to win the spending war.” That’s important, as many streaming services are spending millions on content, and likely overpaying for content as it wants to stand out from the crowded streaming war.
Zaslav continued by noting that he is not sure that adding more content to streaming services deliver much return on investment. Zaslav argues that at some point, streamers will hit the downside and get into diminishing returns to where adding more content won’t do much to move the financial needle for companies.
An example that Zaslav used was this, “If you look at what Casey (Bloys) is doing with HBO, he has ‘Euphoria’ and had ‘Succession’ and has period drama ‘The Gilded Age,’” Zaslav said. “Would HBO be doing a lot better if it had three more really successful scripted series right now? It’s not clear.”
And this is why Zaslav and many other industry watchers, believe that we will see more consolidation in the streaming industry. There are a lot of streaming services out there right now, and many are struggling to get new subscribers. That’s mostly because people don’t want to spend as much as they did with cable, for streaming services. They want one or two, and that’s it.
How does this merger impact streaming sports?
Streaming sports is a complete clusterf*** right now. Mostly thanks to Sinclair. But that’s a story for another time. WarnerMedia does own the Turner Networks, so Warner Bros Discovery does get ownership to a substantial amount of live sports rights. However, surprisingly, HBO MAX has not added any live sports to its network in the US. Though it does broadcast live international soccer in Latin America.
Turner also won the rights to the men’s and women’s US National Soccer teams. It has plans to broadcast some of the games on HBO MAX. Though that has not happened just yet. Don’t forget that Turner also has rights to NBA, MLB and the NHL now, there’s a lot of sports that Zaslav could add to this newly merged streaming service.
However, right now, the plans to add sports are not known. But if Warner Bros Discovery really wants to compete, they will want to add those sports to the service. Peacock already has a number of live sporting events on its service, Apple TV+ just announced MLB games are coming, Amazon Prime has some NFL games, and that’s just a few of the competitors.
Will we see more streaming services combining?
Most likely. Like with other industries, there’s going to be some consolidation that needs to happen. Like after 2001, the airline industry consolidated down to basically three major airlines. The same thing happened with wireless carriers, we’re also down to three of those.
What will likely happen, is it will be consolidated down to each movie studio having a streaming service, and Netflix and Hulu. So that means we’ll likely still have Warner Bros Discovery, along with Peacock (NBCUniversal), Disney+ (Disney/Pixar), Paramount+ (Paramount/ViacomCBS), and Sony will likely stick with Netflix (they used to put everything on STARZ). And that’ll be it.
We may even see some consolidation within the same company. Take ViacomCBS for example, they have three streaming services: Paramount+, BET+ and SHOWTIME. There’s really no reason for BET+ to exist. All that content could be put onto Paramount+ (which is actually cheaper than BET+). Giving everyone more content for the same price. Then keep SHOWTIME as their “premium” option that is ad-free.
It’ll be an interesting few years, as we see what happens here with the streaming industry. But I suspect many services won’t exist as they do today, either rebranded, merged, or just gone completely.
2022-04-11 15:04:32