Ed Ludlow

You and Lucas have already done a great job, so I'll try to pitch in here.

Really WBD and Paramount, more redundancies, more overlap.

They are both traditional TV and film companies with streaming services tacked on.

Whereas Netflix, obviously, as we know, famously or infamously, depending on your perspective, they are a streaming first at all costs company.

So there's less overlap and far more new integration of potentially complimentary or potentially conflicting businesses.

Now, we have seen mega mergers of this nature in the past, but they have almost always been a like versus like company absorbing each other.

We have not really seen a major, major streaming service take a company at the size of Warner Brothers Discovery just yet.

Brendan, we're going later in the program to go deep on the antitrust considerations.

There are antitrust considerations here.

But let's say in either event, Netflix comes out on top or Paramount Skydance comes out on top.

How does that change the landscape of entertainment?

What does it look like to have an entity of that size?

Roughly two-thirds of U.S.

adults who subscribe to HBO Max also subscribe to Netflix, whereas about 40% of HBO Max subscribers also use Paramount+, according to Greenlight Analytics data.

So as of right now, the clear raw subscription streaming upside obviously favors Paramount+, which has about 80 million subscribers globally.

globally.

So they are a solid, growing streamer that's been on original content hot streak since late 2023, but clearly isn't remotely the same size as Netflix, Amazon, or Disney+.

So if Netflix were to get WBD,

they would suddenly be investing in a lot of new businesses.

And we don't know how they would play up theatrical.