After Netflix announced its intended acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery in December, nepo billionaire (copyright: Kismet) and Trump ally David Ellison threw a hissy fit and launched a hostile takeover. Last week, the evil empire scored another win when Netflix withdrew their bid and Ellison’s Paramount Skydance swooped in. To be clear, the evil empire in this scenario is the Trump administration, whose allies will now run CBS, CNN, HBO Max, Twitter X, and TikTok while billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook Apple, and Mark Zuckerberg have all already capitulated in the name of the almighty tax cut.

As I referenced above, once this merger is complete, Paramount Skydance will own CNN and HBO Max, so its holdings will include both the Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services. The general public has heard this story before, most notably when Disney bought Hulu and ESPN, and they don’t like how it ends. When Disney acquired ESPN and Hulu, they kept each individual service separate for a few years, but this year, they’ll phase out Hulu’s individual app and integrate it with Disney+. This time around, Paramount Skydance is just straight up announcing their plans to combine Paramount+ and HBO Max into one giant streaming platform.

Paramount Skydance plans to combine Paramount+ and HBO Max into one streaming service, upon the completion of the merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery.

However, Paramount will want HBO, the brand, to “operate with independence.”

“As we said, we do plan to put the two services together, which today gives us a little over 200 million direct to consumer subscribers,” Paramount CEO David Ellison said during an investor call breaking down the details of the planned merger Monday. “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 in DTC.”

Based on the call, it was not immediately clear what the setup of the new combined streamer will be, and whether HBO Max will be available as a tile within the service or fully integrated. However, Ellison did make it clear Paramount leadership wants to give HBO, currently run by Casey Bloys, the special treatment to continue developing and programming content without heavy oversight from Paramount’s execs.

“Casey and his team do absolutely a remarkable job at HBO,” said Ellison, who told analysts on the call that “Game of Thrones” is his favorite HBO series. “And as 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.”

In December, Netflix outmaneuvered Paramount to secure a deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming businesses for $27.75 per share. Last week, Paramount sweetened its offer to buy all of Warner Bros. Discovery, including its struggling cable business, increasing the proposal from $30 per share to $31 per share. WBD’s board accepted this as the “superior proposal” and Netflix declined to increase its bid, paving the way for the formal announcement of a merger between Paramount and WBD on Friday.

[From Variety]

Well, this sucks and it’s likely just the beginning of the fallout. From a technology standpoint, Paramount+’s app frequently crashes and has a confusing interface, so I can only imagine how much worse it would get with Warner Bros properties added to it. In terms of pricing, I get HBO through my AT&T phone plan and hope that this doesn’t end up f-cking me over. While I do watch some older movies on HBO, I don’t love it enough to subscribe separately, especially if it’s going to exist as another vehicle for fascism.

On that note, given how quickly CBS turned into “See BS,” I have very little hope that HBO Max will “operate with independence.” It’s only a matter of time before they come for John Oliver. The one silver lining in all of this is whenever they do that, I just know that he’s going to go out with guns a-blazing like Stephen Colbert.

Photo note by CB: I cobbled this composite image together from a screenshot of my Paramount+ and HBO Max interfaces. It will surely be less user friendly than this.