Paramount Merger With Warner Brothers Could Put the Squeeze on Peacock

There came word yesterday that there are negotiations between Warner Brothers Discovery and Paramount about potentially merging. My biggest issue is not with the merger itself — these mergers seem fairly inevitable — but with the fact that it may all come under the management of David Zaslav, who remains more interested in shedding debt than making great television and movies.

Still, it makes sense. As much content as Warner Brothers Discovery may already have, it needed a few more things to legitimately compete with the other streamers. HBO is great (or at least it used to be), but the merger would effectively merge HBO with Showtime (which is all but dead anyway), and more importantly, it would give Warner Brothers a broadcast network in CBS. It would mean combining the prestige of CBS News with the global distribution power of CNN. It would put the Game of Thrones universe on the same streamer as the Yellowstone universe.

It would also give Warner Brothers NFL, and as viewers move away from cable and toward streaming, the NFL plus a massive library of content rivaling that of Disney would make Warner/Paramount a necessary subscription service. It would also reduce the number of big platforms to five:

Paramount/Warner Brothers
Netflix
Amazon Prime
Apple TV+
Disney+

The big loser in the merger would be Peacock, the struggling NBC/Universal streamer. It would instantly become the sixth option for an American (and worldwide) public that’s probably going to tap out after five. It also doesn’t leave Peacock with a natural merging partner. Paramount/WB would have CBS; Disney owns ABC. Netflix has never shown any interest in big mergers, and Apple TV+ doesn’t need NBC/Universal because it already has more money than God. Amazon might be interested, but Amazon is never going to share its branding with another company. There will be no NBC/Amazon or Amazon/Universal, so even if Amazon merged with NBC/Universal, those brands would be swallowed into the Amazon ecosystem. Likewise, even if Apple TV wants the Sunday Night NFL game from NBC/Universal and a few other pieces, it’s not going to be interested in MSNBC news or live network programming.

Indeed, even if NBC/Universal merged with all the remaining players — AMC, Acorn, Starz, etc. — it wouldn’t move the needle enough to make it competitive with what would be the Big 5. Where that leaves the long-term fate of NBC/Universal is a big mystery.

The most appealing partner remaining may just be … Roku.