“Casey and his team do absolutely a remarkable job at HBO,” Variety reports Ellison saying on the call, going on to cite Game Of Thrones as one of his favorite shows. “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.”
However, as independently as HBO may be able to operate as a network, it doesn’t sound like it will operate as its own app for very much longer. “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,” Ellison said, though it’s not totally clear whether HBO Max will be completely absorbed into Paramount+ or whether there’ll be an app of a new name. “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 [direct-to-consumer].” The middle of the year benchmark sounds ambitious, if not necessarily unrealistic, given the regulatory approval the merger will need in the U.S. and Europe; while the Ellisons have already shown themselves to be friendly with the Trump administration, what could happen abroad is potentially murkier.
Elsewhere on the call, Ellison offered a meager, jargon-laden pushback about the expected layoffs at the combined company. Deadline reports that Ellison claimed this morning that the layoffs would not touch the production side of WBD, and that the “majority of our synergy target comes from non-labor sources” such as “optimizing the combined real estate footprint and the broader corporate overhead; driving efficiencies in marketing; optimizing spending on agencies; and also migrating the combined company to a single enterprise resource planning, otherwise known as ERP system, and combining other IT systems across the company.” The trade reports that the combined company would likely need to cut north of $6 billion within three years, given the company’s debt.
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