Paramount Plan To Combine Par+ & HBO Max Is Harder Than You Think

CANADA – 2025/05/14: In this photo illustration, the HBO Max logo is seen displayed on a smartphone screen. (Photo Illustration by Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Paramount Skydance (PSKY) CEO David Ellison and COO and Chief Strategy Officer Andy Gordon spoke with Wall Street analysts and reporters Monday morning, laying out their vision of what the company will look like once the planned merger with Warner Bros. Discovery is completed later this year.

One of the topics that came up was the future of the streaming services Paramount+ and HBO Max. During the call, Ellison revealed the company planned to combine the two services into one, although no further details were announced.

“We will combine the streaming portfolios of the two companies into one stronger platform over the coming years,” Ellison said. “With Paramount+ and HBO Max, there are more than 200 million subscribers today, and more than 100 countries and territories worldwide, positioning us to compete effectively with the leading streaming services in today’s marketplace.”

While combining the two platforms might make sense at first glance, the process is a lot more complicated than it seems.

The first complication is that while the 200 million subscriber worldwide figure is technically accurate, it includes some undefined number of subscribers in the United States who might be currently paying for subscriptions to both services.

And aside from the decision about what to call this new streaming platform (Paramount HBO Max Plus With Showtime?), the challenges of integrating all of that content into one platform in a way that allows users to find what they are looking for is a massive problem. And what happens to the standalone streaming service BET+? Or Discovery+, which turns out to be the only profitable streamer in either company?

Discovery+ is an especially interesting case, because even before the merger closed between Discovery Communications and Warner Media, new CEO David Zaslav vowed to get ride of Discovery+ and convince those subscribers to upgrade to what was then called Max. That never happened, because while the subscriber base of Discovery+ isn’t huge, it’s loyal and turned out to be uninterested in switching to a more expensive streaming service.

And then there is the cost of this new streaming platform. Both services are currently losing money. So combining them and simply charging the same price it would cost for each service separately doesn’t get you anywhere. But assuming you want live sports, the cheapest option for HBO Max is their standard plan, which costs $18.49 a month. The cheapest Paramount+ plan that includes live sports is Paramount Essential at $8.49 a month. So that combined service would have to cost $27 a month in order to just match the revenue each service is receiving now.

The situation outside the U.S. is even more complicated. In Asia and the Pacific regions, Paramount+ content is often available through a partnership with a successful local or regional streamer. And while those subscribers are technically “subscribed” to Paramount+, that might not be the reason why they are subscribed to the third party service.

In Europe, there is an entirely different problem.

SkyShowtime, is a 50/50 Paramount–Comcast joint venture operating in 22 European markets. It runs on Comcast’s Peacock tech stack and combines NBCUniversal, Paramount, NBCUniversal and Sky content. It has an estimated 6 million subscribers and has so far been a spectacular financial disaster, having lost about $1.5 billion since its launch in 2021.

Unfortunately for Paramount, not only is its content tied to a struggling streaming platform, over the past 18 months, HBO Max has launched in a number of countries across Europe. As a result, in each of the countries where SkyShowtime is live, there is now also a version of HBO Max.

So not only are some unknown number of subscribers being double counted, it’s not clear what will happen with SkyShowtime. Comcast has been withdrawing from Europe, so it might be willing to either dissolve the joint venture or sell out to Paramount, who would then roll it into HBO Max (or whatever it is going to be called). However, it’s not clear how many of those 6 million subscribers are interested in making the move.

The short answer to all of the question of combining the two services is that there are a lot of moving parts. It’s not clear what will happen either in the United States or globally. And it’s certainly not clear how many of those 200 million global subscribers will still be around when it’s all done.