Oh, great, another streaming service. That might have been your reaction this week to the news that AT&T and Discovery are planning to merge their media assets together, to better take on the streaming giants of Netflix, Disney & Amazon.
For the companies involved, this deal makes a lot of sense on paper. Both AT&T and Discovery, the former of which has a sprawling telecoms business, have seen relatively lacklustre corporate performance in the last 5 years — which has been reflected in their share prices. This deal hopes to take the underperforming media assets from AT&T, which includes HBO, CNN and the Warner Bros. studio (responsible for Harry Potter and many other titles) and combine it with Discovery's relaxing cooking, home renovation and nature content.
Streaming together
Although it may take a while to happen, presumably the plan is to merge the assets under one big streaming brand. That brand, which lets call WarnerHBODiscoveryMaxBros for now, would have an ~80 million strong streaming subscriber base, with 15 million coming from Discovery, and the rest from HBO and HBO Max. That's a long way from Netflix's 208 million, but not so far from Disney+, which has 104 million.
In the battle for eyeballs, scale and focus matter. WarnerHBODiscoveryMaxBros would have both.
