Warner Bros. Discovery reportedly interested in merging Max and Paramount+ in joint venture

Keeping an eye on shares of Paramount and when are we not off the lows of the day on news the company is looking for a streaming partner. And Warner Brothers Discovery could be in the running. Al Sherman broke the story. Joins us now with more details. Hi, Alex. Hey, Mike. Yeah, look, this, the idea of pushing these two companies together may ring familiar to some people. That's because Warner Brothers Discovery actually looked into preliminary talks to merge the two companies earlier this year. They put pencils down on that deal. That it didn't really make sense. Investors didn't really like it. So step two, chapter 2 to this story may be that Paramount Plus and Max could come together in some sort of joint venture. Paramount Global's leadership actually publicly stated their desire to move forward with a deal with someone, whether that be a tech partner or a legacy media provider that already owns a streaming service in a employee town hall last week. The news today that I'm reporting is that there is interest from Warner Brothers Discovery in Paramount Plus in that Paramount content to match it with the content they already own in their Max service. That would theoretically give consumers a more robust streaming offering. So we have this potential combination or you know, joint venture as well as the the various media companies perhaps teaming up for this sports distribution deal on in streaming. It feels as if just everybody feels as if they have to scramble for scale. It's obviously, you know, the main thing for for the players that are not, let's say in the top two. Yeah, like a couple things going on here I think that are important #1A joint venture like this would actually take off theoretically Paramount Plus from the balance sheet of Paramount Global. So Paramount Plus has been losing hundreds of 1,000,000 billions of dollars every year. That may be good news for Paramount Global shareholders if this thing becomes a joint venture and is no longer on the books for Paramount Global. But really in a bigger sense, it speaks to what you just said, that there is a re rationalization of streaming assets going on. So all of these things have been launched or they're about to be launched like the sports service. And all the legacy media companies are kind of thinking, you know what, we've got to do this better. We've got to have more scale, more partners, better monetization of our content, new bundles, new packages, because what we've been doing has been losing us a lot of money. Maybe we're finally at the break even point now is the point that we can make this business into a real money making business for the next 5-10 twenty years.