Skydance plans to fold HBO Max and Paramount+ into one streaming service

Skydance, the name David Ellison’s combined Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery now carries, says its streaming products “will unify into a single service over time.” The line sits in the company’s Oct. 6, 2026 announcement that the roughly $110 billion acquisition has closed, and it settles the long-running question of whether HBO Max and Paramount+ would stay separate apps under one owner.

What the announcement does not contain is nearly as notable as what it does: no name for the merged service, no price, no launch date, and no list of which of today’s apps survive.

A single service over time, in the closing release

The wording comes from Skydance’s own press release, which promises “significant improvements” to its direct-to-consumer products and counts “200+ million streaming subscribers across platforms.” It lists Paramount+, HBO Max and Pluto TV in its description of the company. The text never spells out HBO Max and Paramount+ as the two being merged; that pairing comes from earlier statements by Ellison and from Engadget’s report on the plan.

Ellison laid it out on a March 3, 2026 investor call, days after Paramount Skydance agreed to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. As the Washington Post account republished by The Philadelphia Inquirer recorded it, he said the combined service would carry roughly 200 million direct-to-consumer subscribers, enough to compete with the sector’s leaders, and he gave no date.

Bloys and Perrette run one streaming division

The clearest sign of the direction is organizational. In an Oct. 5 leadership announcement reported by Axios, HBO chief Casey Bloys becomes co-chair and chief content officer of Skydance’s direct-to-consumer division, which covers both Paramount+ and HBO Max. JB Perrette, who ran streaming at Warner Bros. Discovery, becomes its co-chair and chief business officer.

Cindy Holland, Paramount’s most recent head of direct-to-consumer, is leaving the company, while Perrette, who led streaming at Warner Bros. Discovery, takes the chief business officer role over both apps. Ynon Kreiz, the co-CEO, will handle what the announcement calls “day-to-day management and integration of the combined business,” while Ellison concentrates on strategy and creative direction.

HBO should stay HBO

Ellison’s March remarks carried a promise to protect the premium label. Ellison said his viewpoint is that “HBO should stay HBO,” as quoted in the Post account, and the company did not plan to change the brand. Forbes, in a piece published Oct. 7, points out that the leadership announcement still names HBO Max and Paramount+ as distinct brands, and that a person familiar with Paramount’s plans has suggested HBO would likely be a sub-brand inside the larger service.

Disney offers the template Forbes cites: since May 19, subscribers have been able to link Hulu profiles to Disney+ while Hulu remains a standalone app, an example of shared systems without a merged brand. Forbes also cites Antenna data showing that 80 percent of subscribers who joined the Disney-Max bundle between July and September 2024 were still subscribed three months later, against 54 percent for Max alone, a retention gap that gives any combined offering a financial reason to exist.

Price, name and date remain unannounced

The price tag explains the pressure to economize. The release says Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders received $31.01666668 in cash per share, that a $47 billion equity investment was priced at $12.00 per Class B share, and that the combined company has nearly $70 billion in revenue and aims for net leverage of 3.0x by the end of 2029. A business carrying that structure has little reason to run two overlapping subscription apps, two engineering teams and two sets of customer service for longer than it must.

The financial logic is stated openly. Forbes reports that Paramount’s deal filing lists consolidating streaming technology stacks among the sources of more than $6 billion in synergies, and the Skydance release itself targets $6 billion-plus in run-rate synergies over three years. Paramount+ alone had 81.6 million subscribers at the end of the second quarter, so combining it with HBO Max puts both catalogs, from Yellowstone to Game of Thrones, behind one login.

Timing is the piece Ellison has already moved once. On the March call he said Paramount’s own three streaming services would shift onto “one unified stack” by mid-2026, according to Forbes, and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz said the aim in the closing announcement is to accelerate the company’s integrated direct-to-consumer platform. Merging two technology stacks that were built by different companies, for different content libraries and different billing systems, is a separate job from putting both logos on a single home screen, and the release commits to neither a sequence nor a deadline for it.

The settlement that cleared the deal adds one constraint. Forbes says an agreement with 12 state attorneys general requires the merged company to keep offering a free streaming service such as Pluto TV and to maintain its current service and quality, which limits how aggressively either paid app can be stripped down.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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