Warner Bros. Discovery has indicated early curiosity in exploring a partnership with Paramount International to mix WBD’s Max and Paramount+, in keeping with sources.
Paramount International, after its controlling shareholder Shari Redstone scrapped merger talks with Skydance Media final month, is continuing below a brand new strategic plan below three co-CEOs to slash prices, discover the sale of sure belongings and speed up the profitability of Paramount+ through a potential three way partnership with one other participant.
One potential streaming dance associate for Paramount is Warner Bros. Discovery. A supply confirmed WBD’s preliminary curiosity in evaluating a streaming JV with Paramount International, as first reported by CNBC.
After all, it’s not a shock that Warner Bros. Discovery would no less than look into the feasibility of a streaming JV with Paramount, given how public Paramount International’s management group has been about their need to land a associate. At this level, the state of affairs kind of includes every firm kicking the tires on what such a partnership may appear to be.
Reps for Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount International declined to remark.
At Paramount International’s June 25 worker city corridor assembly, Chris McCarthy, one of many members of the three-headed Workplace of the CEO (and CEO of Showtime/MTV Leisure Studios and Paramount Media Networks), mentioned two potential streaming partnerships.
The primary possibility “is to enter a deep, long-term relationship with a number one expertise platform, which already has the total scale that we are attempting to acquire. However what they don’t have is our scale of content material and collectively we’ll make for a really highly effective mixture to drive extra minutes and better income,” McCarthy instructed workers on the city corridor. “And this is able to enable us to focus a better % of our funds on the issues we do finest — that’s making hit content material.”
The second sort of partnership Paramount International is exploring “includes us becoming a member of forces with a number of different SVOD gamers,” McCarthy mentioned. “The sheer quantity of hit content material that we may supply collectively can be great throughout TV, movie and sports activities and would entice thousands and thousands of viewers. Plus, we’d share in all different non-content bills.”
McCarthy mentioned, “The nice information is there’s great curiosity in partnering with us throughout each of those strategic choices, given the energy of our content material, the amount of our hits, and our industry-leading observe report.”
Individually, at a latest funding convention, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav mentioned the corporate can be “opportunistic” in looking for M&A offers within the subsequent two or three years. “There are lots of gamers which are dropping some huge cash,” Zaslav mentioned Might 30 on the Bernstein fortieth Annual Strategic Choices Convention. “There’ll be some gamers that need to get out of the enterprise, that can look to consolidate their streaming companies with others,” he mentioned, including that he believes there can be 4 or 5 dominant international streaming platforms as issues shake out.
Paramount earlier this yr mentioned merging Paramount+ with NBCUniversal’s Peacock previously, however to this point nothing has transpired on that entrance. In the meantime, late final yr, Zaslav and Bob Bakish (then CEO of Paramount) briefly mentioned the thought of merging WBD and Paramount International however these talks didn’t go wherever.
Each Paramount+ and Max have introduced value hikes in the previous few weeks as each corporations are eager on proving to Wall Road that their streaming companies may be worthwhile progress engines.