HBO Max And Paramount+ Will Eventually Combine After “Short-Term” Bundling Phase, David Ellison Says

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 held on the Paramount lot to mark the closing of the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. “It’ll take a period of time to do that. So, I think in the immediate [term], you will see them operated separately, with things like bundling or things that you’ll be able to see accelerated in the relatively short term. I can’t be specific about that yet today.” Already, the company has managed to bring together the tech stacks of Paramount+, BET+ and Pluto TV, a shift that subscribers and viewers do not notice. Ellison credited “the way AI technology and other things have progressed” for providing a boost to that process. He stopped short of saying outright that those advancements could simplify the cumbersome process of uniting streaming services into a single product. And he also did not address the pricing or strategy for consumer adoption and retention of a single service with multiple branded tiers, a puzzle that general-entertainment services have to solve as they gain scale. Watch on Deadline Ellison said the centralization of tech stacks after the merger close will happen “as quickly as possible,” noting that the project was completed “in record time” after Skydance took over Paramount in August 2025. Ellison’s projection, which came a few hours after the close of the Skydance merger, seemed to point in a different strategic direction than recent comments by Casey Bloys, head of HBO and HBO Max content. Bloys hinted that bundling would be the focus given the distinct subscriber bases of the two services, which combined have more than 200 million global subscribers. A slide deck released by Skydance earlier this week included images of both streamers, indicating at least they would both continue independently, at least for now. Across the streaming landscape, a number of players have found it complex and expensive to meld two services into one. Disney has been chipping away at a long-term positioning of Disney+ as its mother ship and Hulu programming migrating there behind a home-screen tile. Sometimes, viewer feedback can cause a rethink, as was the case when WarnerMedia merged with Discovery Communications in 2022. Initially, executives pursued a plan to merge unscripted and lifestyle service Discovery+ with HBO Max under the new umbrella brand Max. Warner Bros. Discovery stepped back from that plan and also reversed the Max rebrand amid viewer and partner confusion and resistance.