Skydance Chairman and CEO David Ellison sees HBO Max and Paramount+ combining into a single service over time after a “short-term” phase as separate but bundled services.
“Long term, the plan is basically to bring them together,” Ellison said at a press event on the Paramount lot to mark the completion of the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. “It’ll take some time to get there. So I think in the immediate future you’ll see them operating separately, with things like bundling or things you might see accelerated in the relatively short term. I can’t be specific on that yet today.”
The company has already managed to bring together the tech stacks of Paramount+, BET+ and Pluto TV, a change that subscribers and viewers don’t notice. Ellison credited “the way AI technology and other things have progressed” for spurring this process. He didn’t say upfront that these advances could simplify the tedious process of unifying streaming services into a single product. And it also didn’t address pricing or consumer adoption and retention strategy for a single service with multiple branding tiers, a puzzle that general entertainment services must solve as they gain scale.
Ellison said the centralization of the tech stacks after the merger closes will happen “as quickly as possible,” noting that the project was completed “in record time” after Skydance acquired Paramount in August 2025. Sources tell Deadline that the consolidation of the tech stacks is expected to be completed within a year.
Ellison’s projection, which came hours after the Skydance merger closed, seemed to move in a different strategic direction than recent comments from Casey Bloys, head of HBO and HBO Max content. Bloys hinted that the consolidation would be a focus given the separate subscriber bases of the two services, which together have more than 200 million subscribers worldwide. A slideshow released by Skydance earlier this week included footage of both streamers, at least indicating that they will both continue independently, at least for now.
Public statements from Ellison and others have already suggested that combining the services into a single super-app has always been the ambition, although moving from the current setup to a fully integrated future will require a lot of work.
In the streaming landscape, a number of players have found merging two services into one complex and costly. Disney has scaled back Disney+’s long-term positioning as a mothership, with Hulu programming migrating there behind a home screen tile. Sometimes viewer feedback can lead to rethinking, as was the case when WarnerMedia merged with Discovery Communications in 2022. Initially, executives pursued a plan to merge the unscripted and lifestyle service Discovery+ with HBO Max under the new umbrella brand Max. Warner Bros. Discovery withdrew from this project, citing demand for the cheaper (and profitable) Discovery+ as a standalone product. They also ended up reversing the Max rebranding after two years of confusion and resistance from viewers and partners.
Gn entert
