warner bros. discovery

All the ways streaming services are aggravating their subscribers this week

ads, Comcast, nbcuniversal, netflix, peacock, Sony, streaming, Tech, warner bros. discovery / Mike M. / May 2, 2024

Streaming services like Netflix and Peacock have already found multiple ways to aggravate paying subscribers this week.

The streaming industry has been heating up. As media giants rush to establish a successful video streaming business, they often make platform changes that test subscribers’ patience and the value of streaming.

Below is a look at the most exasperating news from streaming services from this week. The scale of this article demonstrates how fast and frequently disappointing streaming news arises. Coincidentally, as we wrote this article, another price hike was announced.

We’ll also examine each streaming platform’s financial status to get an idea of what these companies are thinking (spoiler: They’re thinking about money).

Peacock’s raising prices

For the second time in the past year, NBCUniversal is bumping the price of Peacock, per The Hollywood Reporter (THR) on Monday.

As of July 18, if you try to sign up for Peacock Premium (which has ads), it’ll cost $7.99 per month, up from $5.99/month today. Premium Plus, (which doesn’t have ads), will go up from $11.99/month to $13.99/month. Annual subscription pricing for the ad plan is increasing 33.3 percent from $59.99 to $79.99, and the ad-free annual plan’s price will rise 16.7 percent from $119.99/year to $139.99/year.

Those already subscribed to Peacock won’t see the changes until August 17, six days after the closing ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics, which will stream on Peacock.

The pricing changes will begin eight days before the Olympics’ opening ceremony. That means that in the days leading up to the sporting event, signing up for Peacock will cost more than ever. That said, there’s still time to sign up Peacock for its current pricing.

As noted by THR, the changes come as NBCUniversal may feel more confident about its streaming service, which now includes big-ticket items, like exclusive NFL games and Oppenheimer (which Peacock streamed exclusively for a time), in addition to new features for the Olympics, like multiview.

Some outspoken subscribers, though, aren’t placated.

“Just when I was starting to like the service,” Reddit user MarkB1997 said in response to the news. “I’ll echo what everyone has been saying for a while now, but these services are pricing themselves out of the market.”

Peacock subscribers already experienced a price increase on August 17, 2023. At the time, Peacock’s Premium pricing went from $4.99/month to $5.99/month, and the Premium Plus tier from $9.99/month to $11.99/month.

Peacock’s pockets

Peacock’s price bumps appear to be a way for the younger streaming service to inch closer to profitability amid a major, quadrennial, global event.

NBCUniversal parent company Comcast released its Q1 2024 earnings report last week, showing that Peacock, which launched in July 2020, remains unprofitable. For the quarter, Peacock lost $639 million, compared to $825 million in Q4 2023 and $704 million in Q1 2023. Losses were largely attributed to higher programming costs.

Peacock’s paid subscriber count is lower than some of its rivals. The platform ended the quarter with 34 million paid users, up from 31 million at the end of 2023. Revenue also rose, with the platform pulling in $1.1 billion, representing a 54 percent boost compared to the prior year.

Sony bumps Crunchyroll prices weeks after shuttering Funimation

Today, Sony’s anime streaming service Crunchyroll announced that it’s increasing subscription prices as follows:

The Mega Fan Tier, which allows streaming on up to four devices simultaneously, will go from $9.99/month to $11.99/month
The Ultimate Fan Tier, which allows streaming on up to six devices simultaneously, will go from $14.99/month to $15.99/month

Crunchyroll’s cheapest plan ($7.99/month) remains unchanged. None of Crunchyroll’s subscription plans have ads. Crunchyroll’s also adding discounts to its store for each subscription tier, but this is no solace for those who don’t shop there on a monthly basis or at all.

The news of higher prices comes about a month after Sony shuttered Funimation, an anime streaming service it acquired in 2017. After buying Crunchyroll in 2021, Funimation was somewhat redundant for Sony. And now that Sony has converted all remaining Funimation accounts into Crunchyroll accounts (while deleting Funimation digital libraries), it’s forcing many customers to pay more to watch their favorite anime.

A user going by BioMountain on Crunchyroll said the news is “not great,” since they weren’t “a big fan of having to switch from Funimation to begin with, especially since that app was so much better” than Crunchyroll.

Interestingly, when Anime News Network asked on February 29 whether Crunchyroll would see prices rise over the next two years, the company told the publication that predicting a price change for that time frame would be improbable.

Crunching numbers

Crunchyroll had 5 million paid subscribers in 2021 but touted over 13 million in January, (plus over 89 million unpaid users, per Bloomberg). Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini has said that Crunchyroll is profitable, but not by how much.

In 2023, Goldman Sachs estimated that Crunchyroll would represent 36 percent of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s profit by 2028, compared to about 1 percent in March.

However, Purini has shown interest in growing the company further and noted to Variety in February an increase in “general entertainment” companies getting into anime.

Still, anime remains a more niche entertainment category, and Crunchyroll is more specialized than some other streaming platforms. With Sony making it so that anime fans have one less streaming service option and jacking up the prices for one of the limited options, it’s showing that it wants as much of the $20 billion anime market as possible.

Crunchyroll claimed today that its pricing changes are tied to “investment in more anime, additional services like music and games, and additional subscriber benefits.”

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CNN, record holder for shortest streaming service, wants another shot

CNN, News, streaming, Tech, Uncategorized, warner bros. discovery / Ari B / April 20, 2024

CNN++? —

New CNN head thinks CNN+ “was abandoned rather briskly.”

Scharon Harding – Apr 19, 2024 9: 28 pm UTC

On March 29, 2022, CNN+, CNN’s take on a video streaming service, debuted. On April 28, 2022, it shuttered, making it the fastest shutdown of any launched streaming service. Despite that discouraging superlative, CNN has plans for another subscription-based video streaming platform, Financial Times (FT) reported on Wednesday.

Mark Thompson, who took CNN’s helm in August 2023, over a year after CNN+’s demise, spoke with FT about evolving the company. The publication reported that Thompson is “working on plans for a digital subscription streaming service.” The executive told the publication that a digital subscription, including digital content streaming, is “a serious possibility,” adding, “no decisions had been made, but I think it’s quite likely that we’ll end up there.”

CNN++, or whatever a new CNN streaming package might be named, would not just be another CNN+, per Thompson.

“We’ll know in a few years time if we’re beginning to make progress, even if that still doesn’t look like it because of the aggregation of declining platforms and growing ones,” he said, requesting patience regarding the next chapter in CNN streaming.

Thompson noted that success “won’t happen overnight,” which suggests a slow timeline.

CNN+’s short ride

Thompson told FT that CNN+ was “a big, bold experiment which was abandoned rather briskly.”

Company executives discussed plans for a CNN streaming service as early as December 2020, and in May 2021, employees learned that CNN+ was happening, Deadline reported. By July 2021, CNN confirmed the plans publicly.

But under a year later, CNN+ was no longer available, with the closure largely viewed as a casualty of parent company WarnerMedia merging with Discovery to form Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) 10 days after CNN+’s launch. The merger meant CNN now had a parent company that already owned the Discovery+ streaming service and HBO Max; it also had interest in merging Discovery content with that of HBO. In August 2022, a few months after CNN+ closed, WBD announced Max as its flagship streaming service, merging what was formerly HBO Max with Discovery+.

“In a complex streaming market, consumers want simplicity and an all-in[-one] service which provides a better experience and more value than stand-alone offerings,” Discovery’s streaming boss J.B. Perrette said in statement regarding CNN+’s closure.

CNN+ accrued high-profile news anchors, and in its three weeks of availability, it had an estimated subscriber count of 100,000–150,000, according to Variety, which reported that the early figure put the streaming service on track for year-one quotas. However, CNBC later reported that daily viewership was just around 4,000, citing an anonymous source.

In an internal meeting, Perrette showed “frustration” that CNN moved forward with CNN+’s rollout despite its parent company’s merger plans, according to CNN. Perrette reportedly told employees that “some of this was avoidable.” CNN’s report noted that during the merger process, Discovery executives were not legally allowed to communicate with CNN executives.

CNN+’s 29-day existence makes it the shortest-lived streaming service. It took the record from Quibi, which launched in April 8, 2020, and announced on October 21, 2020, that it was throwing in the towel (Roku eventually bought Quibi for cheap).

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Devs left with tough choices as Warner Bros. ends all Adult Swim Games downloads

adult swim games, gaming, steam, warner bros. discovery, Warner Brothers, wb discovery / Ryan Harris / March 10, 2024

Game preservation is important —

Some can relist games on Steam or consoles—but without reviews or fan content.

Kevin Purdy – Mar 8, 2024 6: 23 pm UTC

A plucky, likable creature under the looming threat of consumption by an interconnected menacing force of nature in one of Adult Swim Games' titles. — Enlarge / A plucky, likable creature under the looming threat of consumption by an interconnected menacing force of nature in one of Adult Swim Games’ titles.

Adult Swim Games

Warner Bros. Discovery seems set to remove at least 16 games from its Adult Swim Games subsidiary from games markets and has told the affected developers that it will not transfer the games back to them nor offer other means of selling them in the future.

Ars reported Wednesday on the plight of Small Radios Big Televisions, a Steam and PlayStation game made by a solo developer who received a notice from Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) that it was “retiring” his game within 60 days.

In a comment on that Ars post, Matt Kain, developer of Adult Swim Games’ Fist Puncher, noted that they had received the same “retired” notice from WBD. “When we requested that Warner Bros simply transfer the game over to our studio’s Steam publisher account so that the game could stay active, they said no. The transfer process literally takes a minute to initiate (look up “Transferring Applications” in the Steamworks documentation), but their rep claimed they have simply made the universal decision not to transfer the games to the original creators,” Kain wrote.

Kain noted that his game’s players “have 10+ years of discussions, screenshots, gameplay footage, leaderboards, player progress, unlocked characters, Steam achievements, Steam cards, etc. which will all be lost.” In addition, Kickstarter backers of the game will lose access to a game in which they have a cameo, and his firm, Team2Bit, would likely face backlash if they re-released the game under their own account, forcing a second purchase from some customers.

“It seems like more and more the videogame industry is filled with people that don’t like and don’t care about videogames. All that to say, buy physical games, make back-ups, help preserve our awesome industry and art form,” Kain wrote on Ars early Thursday. Kain also posted about the predicament on the Fist Puncher discussion page on Steam.

Adult Swim Games has not published a game since 2020. Its parent company has said it was due for a “tough” quarter, and perhaps year, as its tentpole game Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League failed to find a sustaining audience. On a broader level, WBD has been conspicuously culling titles and removing access to its content, sometimes in pursuit of tax advantages. The firm has killed and hidden away films including Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme, removed canceled shows and well-regarded animation and kids’ content, and, just this week, closed down gaming and anime studio Rooster Teeth.

Ars has reached out to Warner Bros. Discovery for comment and has yet to hear back.

“It takes literally three clicks”

Polygon received confirmation from the developer of the rhythm/bullet-hell game Soundodger+ that they received a delisting notice. Michael Molinari told Polygon that he, too, requested his game be transferred—and “explained clearly that it takes literally three clicks to transfer ownership to me”—but a WBD representative rejected his request.

Molinari said the rep cited “logistical and resource constraints” and “the limited capacity of our team,” referring to Adult Swim Games. Molinari said he was told he could republish his game—but without any of its community content, reviews, patch notes, or other accrued content. Molinari also said he was required to remove all mention of Adult Swim Games from any future release, which struck him as erasing due credit.

Steam lists 16 games (and individual soundtrack purchases) in an Adult Swim Games bundle on Steam. The Delisted Games site lists 18 Steam games still published by Adult Swim Games, six games now under different publishers, and two mobile games.

From 2011, it feels important to mention.

Adult Swim Games

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Max confirms 2024 password crackdown, explores adding transactional ads

max, streaming, Tech, warner bros. discovery / Mike M. / March 6, 2024

Monkey see, monkey do —

WBD looking for ways to grow newfound streaming business profitability.

Scharon Harding – Mar 5, 2024 11: 27 pm UTC

Ellie in the HBO show — Enlarge / Max viewers will soon need their own account to watch Ellie in *The Last of Us*.

Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) has confirmed that it will be cracking down on password sharing for its Max streaming service starting this year. The news follows streaming rivals, including Netflix and, soon, Disney-owned Disney+ and Hulu, in banning the sharing of account login information with people outside of the account holder’s household.

As spotted by TheWrap, while speaking at Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media, and Telecom 2024 conference in San Francisco on Monday, JB Perrette, CEO and president of global streaming and games at WBD, said that WBD sees a password-sharing crackdown as a “growth opportunity.”

“Obviously Netflix has implemented [its password crackdown] extremely successfully. We’re gonna be doing that starting later this year and into ’25,” Perrette said.

Netflix famously launched the password crackdown trend in March 2022 and brought the rule changes to US subscribers in May 2023. Netflix had excused password sharing for years, but in 2022, it lost subscribers—about 200,000—for the first time since 2011. At the time, Netflix had 221.64 million subscribers; its most recent subscriber count was 260 million.

However, Max is unlikely to see the same subscriber surge as Netflix did. After all, Netflix’s ban on password sharing started after 17 years of gaining millions of subscribers. The Max streaming service has only been around for four years, a number that includes HBO Max, as Perrette pointed out, noting that banning account sharing is still a ”meaningful” financial prospect.

Perrette didn’t get into details about how Max’s password crackdown would work and how it might apply to the Discovery+ streaming service that WBD also owns.

New types of ads on Max

WBD is aiming to grow its streaming business with more subscribers and less churn as it expands to other markets and tries to boost content selection following a light year impacted by strikes.

On Monday, Perrette also discussed interest in changing the types of ads its streaming service shows. On the network side, HBO is known as a channel with very few commercials and a primary focus on its own content. Now that WBD is focusing on driving the streaming side of HBO through the Max app, it would prefer that the content be more synonymous with ads. Streaming services report making more money per user on average when they use a streaming subscription with ads rather than paying more for no commercials.

Per Perrette:

On the ad format size, we’ve made lots of improvements from where we were, but we still have a lot of ad format enhancements that will give us more things that we can go to marketers with, [like] shoppable ads [and] other elements of the ad format side of the house that we can improve …

Again, Max isn’t starting a trend here. Amazon Prime Video, for example, is already looking at transactional ads. Disney+ announced beta testing for shoppable ads to advertisers in January. Hulu has worked with transactional ads for years. Peacock sells them, too. Apple TV+ still doesn’t have an ad tier for its streaming service, but recent hires have people suspecting that that may change.

Perrette also touched on scaling WBD’s streaming business by bundling with third-party services, as Max does with Verizon. Perrette said WBD is in discussions with other partners for potential bundles.

WBD’s strategies come as it tries to grow the profitability of its streaming businesses. In its earnings report shared on February 23, WBD said that its direct-to-consumer (DTC) business, which includes the Max and Discovery+ streaming services and HBO network, made a profit of $103 million in 2023. In 2022, WBD’s DTC business lost $2.1 billion. The company most recently reported having 97.7 million DTC subscribers, compared to the 95.8 million that it finished Q2 2023 with.

Outside of Max, WBD is planning to launch a joint sports-streaming app with Fox and Disney; some, including rival streamers, however, have challenged the proposed joint venture as monopolistic. This week, also at Morgan Stanley’s event, Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch said he expects the future sports-streaming service to have 5 million subscribers five years after launch, Bloomberg reported.

But as streaming services like Max contemplate ways to make more money in the near term, subscribers are facing a pivotal point. Streaming is increasingly mirroring traditional cable companies in terms of being ad-driven, promoting long-term subscriptions, enacting price hikes, bundling, and threatening possible consolidation. While such moves might make sense from a business perspective, in many cases the result is unhappy subscribers.

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Paramount ends Warner Bros. Discovery merger talks, continues mulling sell-off

max, paramount, streaming, Tech, warner bros. discovery / Blake Jones / February 29, 2024

Max and Paramount+ staying separate —

Report: Paramount still contemplating selling to Skydance Media.

Scharon Harding – Feb 28, 2024 9: 14 pm UTC

Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) and Paramount Global are no longer considering a merger that would have put the Max and Paramount+ streaming services under one corporate umbrella. Per a CNBC report today citing anonymous “people familiar with the matter,” WBD and Paramount had been mulling a merger for “several months.”

In December, reports started swirling about WBD and Paramount discussing a potential merger. Axios even reported that WBD CEO David Zaslav and Paramount CEO Bob Bakish met in person for “several hours” and that Zaslav also met with Shari Redstone, the owner of National Amusements Inc. (NAI), Paramount’s parent company. Now, CNBC reports that discussions between the media giants “cooled off this month.” Paramount and WBD haven’t commented.

When news of the potential merger dropped, it was unclear what sort of regulatory hurdles the media conglomerates might have faced if they tried becoming one. Combined, the companies would have had the second-biggest streaming business by subscriber count, trailing Netflix.

Debt was also a huge concern. Paramount is $14.6 billion in debt, per its earnings report shared today. WBD was $40 billion in debt at the time of merger talks but said it was eyeing a profitable streaming business. WBD is still in debt currently but reported this month that its streaming business became profitable, making $103 million for the year. Max’s most recent subscriber count is 97.7 million compared to 67.5 million for Paramount+.

Merging with Paramount would have meant WBD added another company with struggling legacy media assets to its portfolio. It also would have meant buying a streaming service that has yet to turn a profit as of this writing. Paramount’s streaming business lost $1.66 billion in 2023, it reported today.

Merger still possible

Although things with WBD reportedly didn’t work out, Paramount is still seriously considering a merger. CNBC reported that the company formed a committee and hired a financial adviser focused on analyzing potential bids for all or parts of the company.

Suitors recently tied to Paramount include Byron Allen and, reportedly, Skydance Media. The David Ellison-owned company is “still performing due diligence on a potential transaction,” CNBC said today, citing two of its anonymous sources. In January, Bloomberg reported that Skydance made an all-cash offer for NAI.

Paramount could also try to bundle its services with another company’s, which could attract subscribers to Paramount+ and help Paramount save money. It has already considered bundling Paramount+ with Comcast’s Peacock through a partnership or joint venture, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported earlier this month. But Comcast doesn’t want to buy Paramount, per one of CNBC’s anonymous sources from today’s report.

Some streaming rivals to Paramount+ are already bundled together (such as Disney’s Disney+ and Hulu) and exploring joint ventures. As streaming services race to achieve the sort of profitability that Netflix has, big strategic moves, such as mergers, partnerships, and price hikes, are expected soon. Meanwhile, subscribers remain worried about potential fallout, which could result in monopolistic practices that limit consumer options.

This article was updated to include information from Paramount’s latest earnings report.

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Does Fubo’s antitrust lawsuit against ESPN, Fox, and WBD stand a chance?

antitrust, Disney, Fox, lawsuits, Policy, sports, streaming, Tech, warner bros. discovery / Ryan Harris / February 23, 2024

Collaborating conglomerates —

Fubo: Media giants’ anticompetitive tactics already killed PS Vue, other streamers.

Scharon Harding – Feb 22, 2024 5: 56 pm UTC

Fubo is suing Fox Corporation, The Walt Disney Company, and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) over their plans to launch a unified sports streaming app. Fubo, a live sports streaming service that has business relationships with the three companies, claims the firms have engaged in anticompetitive practices for years, leading to higher prices for consumers.

In an attempt to understand how much potential the allegations have to derail the app’s launch, Ars Technica read the 73-page sealed complaint and sought opinions from some antitrust experts. While some of Fubo’s allegations could be hard to prove, Fubo isn’t the only one concerned about the joint app’s potential to make it hard for streaming services to compete fairly.

Fubo wants to kill ESPN, Fox, and WBD’s joint sports app

Earlier this month, Disney, which owns ESPN, WBD (whose sports channels include TBS and TNT), and Fox, which owns Fox broadcast stations and Fox Sports channels like FS1, announced plans to launch an equally owned live sports streaming app this fall. Pricing hasn’t been confirmed but is expected to be in the $30-to-$50-per-month range. Fubo, for comparison, starts at $80 per month for English-language channels.

Via a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, Fubo is seeking an injunction against the app and joint venture (JV), a jury trial, and damages for an unspecified figure. There have been reports that Fubo was suing the three companies for $1 billion, but a Fubo spokesperson confirmed to Ars that this figure is incorrect.

“Insurmountable barriers”

Fubo, which was founded in 2015, is arguing that the three companies’ proposed app will result in higher prices for live sports streaming customers.

The New York City-headquartered company claims the collaboration would preclude other distributors of live sports content, like Fubo, from competing fairly. The lawsuit also claims that distributors like Fubo would see higher prices and worse agreements associated with licensing sports content due to the JV, which could even stop licensing critical sports content to companies like Fubo. Fubo’s lawsuit says that “once they have combined forces, Defendants’ incentive to exclude Fubo and other rivals will only increase.”

Disney, Fox, and WBD haven’t disclosed specifics about how their JV will impact how they license the rights to sports events to companies outside of their JV; however, they have claimed that they will license their respective entities to the JV on a non-exclusive basis.

That statement doesn’t specify, though, if the companies will try to bundle content together forcibly,

“If the three firms get together and say, ‘We’re no longer going to provide to you these streams for resale separately. You must buy a bundle as a condition of getting any of them,’ that would … be an anti-competitive bundle that can be challenged under antitrust law,” Hal Singer, an economics professor at The University of Utah and managing director at Econ One, told Ars.

Lee Hepner, counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project, shared similar concerns about the JV with Ars:

Joint ventures raise the same concerns as mergers when the effect is to shut out competitors and gain power to raise prices and reduce quality. Sports streaming is an extremely lucrative market, and a joint venture between these three powerhouses will foreclose the ability of rivals like Fubo to compete on fair terms.

Fubo’s lawsuit cites research from Citi, finding that, combined, ESPN (26.8 percent), Fox (17.3 percent), and WBD (9.9 percent) own 54 percent of the US sports rights market.

In a statement, Fubo co-founder and CEO David Gandler said the three companies “are erecting insurmountable barriers that will effectively block any new competitors” and will leave sports streamers without options.

The US Department of Justice is reportedly eyeing the JV for an antitrust review and plans to look at the finalized terms, according to a February 15 Bloomberg report citing two anonymous “people familiar with the process.”

Does Fubo’s antitrust lawsuit against ESPN, Fox, and WBD stand a chance? Read More »

Debt-laden Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount consider merger

culture, max, movies, paramount, paramount plus, streaming, Tech, TV, warner bros. discovery / Ryan Harris / December 21, 2023

Game of Thrones — Enlarge / Media firms are looking for allies to help them take the coveted media throne.

The CEOs of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) and Paramount Global discussed a potential merger on Tuesday, according to a report from Axios citing “multiple” anonymous sources. No formal talks are underway yet, according to The Wall Street Journal. But the discussions look like the start of consolidation discussions for the media industry during a tumultuous time of forced evolution.

On Wednesday, Axios reported that WBD head David Zaslav and Paramount head Bob Bakish met in Paramount’s New York City headquarters for “several hours.”

Zaslav and Shari Redstone, owner of Paramount’s parent company National Amusements Inc (NAI), have also spoken, Axios claimed.

One of the publication’s sources said a WBD acquisition of NAI, rather than only Paramount Global, is possible.

Talks to unite the likes of Paramount’s film studio, Paramount+ streaming service, and TV networks (including CBS, BET, Nickelodeon, and Showtime) with WBD’s Max streaming service, CNN, Cinemax, and DC Comics properties are reportedly just talks, but Axios said WBD “hired bankers to explore the deal.”

It’s worth noting that WBD will suffer a big tax hit if it engages in merger and acquisition activity before April 8 due to a tax formality related to Discovery’s merger with WarnerMedia (which formed Warner Bros. Discovery) in 2022.

A union of debts

Besides the reported talks being in very early stages, there are reasons to be skeptical about a WBD and Paramount merger. The biggest one? Debt.

The New York Times notes that WBD has $40 billion in debt and $5 billion in free cash flow. Paramount, meanwhile, has $15 billion in debt and a negative cash flow. Zaslav has grown infamous for slashing titles and even enacting layoffs to save costs. But WBD is eyeing greener pastures and declared Max as “getting slightly profitable” in October. Adding more debt to WBD’s plate could be viewed as a step backward.

Additionally, Paramount is even more connected to old, flailing forms of media than WBD, as noted by The Information, which pointed to two-thirds of Paramount’s revenue coming from traditional TV networks.

Antitrust concerns could also impact such a deal.

WBD stocks closed down 5.7 percent, and Paramount’s closed down 2 percent after Axios’ report broke.

Of course, these details about a potential merger may have been reported because WBD and/or Paramount want us to know about it so that they can gauge market reaction and/or entice other media companies to discuss potential deals.

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