Warner Bros. Discovery; Paramount International
Warner Bros. Discovery has indicated early curiosity in exploring a partnership with Paramount International to mix WBD’s Max and Paramount+, based on sources.
Paramount International, after its controlling shareholder Shari Redstone scrapped merger talks with Skydance Media final month, is continuing beneath a brand new strategic plan beneath three co-CEOs to slash prices, discover the sale of sure belongings and speed up the profitability of Paramount+ by way of a potential three way partnership with one other participant.
One potential streaming dance accomplice 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 at the very least look into the feasibility of a streaming JV with Paramount, given how public Paramount International’s management workforce has been about their want to land a accomplice. At this level, the state of affairs roughly entails every firm kicking the tires on what such a partnership might appear like.
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 choice “is to enter a deep, long-term relationship with a number one expertise platform, which already has the complete scale that we are attempting to acquire. However what they don’t have is our scale of content material and collectively we are going to make for a really highly effective mixture to drive extra minutes and higher earnings,” McCarthy instructed workers on the city corridor. “And this may permit us to focus a higher p.c of our finances on the issues we do finest — that’s making hit content material.”
The second kind of partnership Paramount International is exploring “entails us becoming a member of forces with a number of different SVOD gamers,” McCarthy stated. “The sheer quantity of hit content material that we might supply collectively could be great throughout TV, movie and sports activities and would entice hundreds of thousands of viewers. Plus, we’d share in all different non-content bills.”
McCarthy stated, “The nice information is there may be great curiosity in partnering with us throughout each of those strategic choices, given the energy of our content material, the quantity of our hits, and our industry-leading observe report.”
Individually, at a current funding convention, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav stated the corporate shall be “opportunistic” in looking for M&A offers within the subsequent two or three years. “There are loads of gamers which can be dropping some huge cash,” Zaslav stated Could 30 on the Bernstein fortieth Annual Strategic Selections Convention. “There’ll be some gamers that wish to get out of the enterprise, that may look to consolidate their streaming companies with others,” he stated, including that he believes there shall 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 thus far 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 worth hikes in the previous couple of weeks as each firms are eager on proving to Wall Road that their streaming companies could be worthwhile development engines.