Skydance chairman and CEO David Ellison has reset the road map for two of the biggest streaming brands. Speaking after the Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery merger closed, he confirmed the long-term goal is a single service combining HBO Max and Paramount+. In the near term, the apps will operate separately and the company plans to offer a discounted bundle. As Ellison put it, “the plan is basically to bring them together.”
The clarification matters because last week Casey Bloys, Skydance’s new co-chair and chief creative officer of direct-to-consumer, suggested the services might stay separate. A corporate deck naming the two streamers individually had fuelled that reading. Ellison’s comments are the clearest public signal yet on the end state.
The scale is substantial: more than 220 million global subscribers sit across the two services, with HBO Max above 140 million and Paramount+ at 81.6 million.
Why the sequencing matters
This is not a simple rebrand. HBO Max will eventually need to move onto the technology stack already used by Paramount+, Pluto TV and BET+. That migration takes time, so the bundle phase is not a pause; it is a retention strategy before the final product is merged.
For media planners and content sellers, the bundle is the first pricing signal. Expect promotions designed to hold both subscriber bases while the back end is consolidated.
- Short term: separate apps with a discounted bundle.
- Medium term: HBO Max migrates to Paramount+’s tech stack.
- Long term: one combined streaming service, with no timeline given.
Casey Bloys, who recently signed a contract through at least 2032, will lead the direct-to-consumer integration.
Commissioning will feel the change first
The clearest operational impact will be in the US, where both services greenlight the largest share of their scripted and unscripted shows. But markets such as the UK, Australia, Canada, Spain and Latin America are now open questions.
The UK has an asymmetry. HBO has no local commissioning team and has repeatedly argued it does not need one, while Paramount+ has commissioned UK originals including The Crow Girl, The Revenge Club and MobLand. In Australia, Paramount+ has backed more than 30 local originals since 2021, while HBO Max has not commissioned local content since entering in March 2025. In Latin America, Paramount+’s original commissions dropped from over 30 in 2022 to three in 2023, according to Ampere Analysis, while HBO Max has continued commissioning in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil.
Canada is structurally different: HBO Max has never launched there, and Bell Media licenses HBO and HBO Max programming for Crave. Bell Media president Sean Cohan has said the output deal has no change-of-ownership clause and should run for years.
The content-spend question
Ellison says the goal is to expand overall content output, not reduce it. The combined company has committed to at least 180 shows a year and at least 30 theatrical films annually with a minimum 45-day theatrical window. But the arithmetic is being watched closely: the company is carrying around US$80bn in debt and large sports commitments, including Paramount’s US$7.7bn seven-year UFC rights deal.
For independent producers, the stated commitment to keep commissioning from independent studios and licensing content to third parties is a line to test against actual greenlights over the next 12 to 18 months.
Source: C21media
