Paramount has now completed its $A160 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery. While nothing is concrete yet and it could be some time before the company makes a major move in its Aussie market, but it’s clear a major shake up to the streaming landscapes is in the pipeline,” writes streaming columnist NICK OVERALL.  

Hands have been shaken for one of the biggest Hollywood studio mergers in history and it could soon hit the wallets of Aussie streaming subscribers.

Paramount has now completed its acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery in a deal worth $US110 billion ( $A160 billion). 

The scale of it is hard to put into words.

Paramount had to outbid even Netflix to secure the trove of hugely popular franchises in an agreement that President Donald Trump had to personally approve. 

The combined company is now simply called Skydance and it brings together some of the biggest movie and television collections on Earth.

Currently, the content of Warner Bros and Paramount is split across two different streaming platforms in Australia.

Warner Bros has the HBO Max, which includes shows such as Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Euphoria and the highly anticipated Harry Potter reboot coming in December.

That’s on top of cultural juggernauts such as Lord of the Rings, Friends, Sex and the City and the DC superheroes universe (Superman, Batman, and all the rest).

On the other hand, Paramount has huge names in its vault such as Yellowstone, NCIS and South Park and Mission: Impossible, to name only a few, that are available on its streaming site Paramount Plus. 

The merging of these two companies means the libraries of both streaming services will likely come together to form one mega catalogue of content. Exactly what it will look like isn’t confirmed but Skydance has flagged that is the long-term plan. 

On paper, it seems like it could be a win for subscribers who are already inundated with platforms to choose from.

In Australia we’ve got Netflix, Stan, Paramount Plus, HBO Max, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV Plus, and every other brand suffix in the English language. 

One less streaming service seems pretty good, right?

While that may become the case, there’s a good chance that when Paramount and Warner Bros combine their content, subscription pricing for this mega platform is likely to be severely hiked up in return for the added content.

The standard price for an HBO Max subscription is currently $15.99 a month, while it’s $12.99 for Paramount Plus.

If the platforms did merge, it seems unlikely they’d lift the cost to $29 a month out of fear of losing subscribers to competing platforms such as  Netflix but a substantial increase would definitely be on the cards. 

The problem would be competing platforms such as Netflix then also decide to dig deeper into the wallets of subscribers in return, lifting the general cost of streaming to a point where the “convenience” of the whole idea that saw it take off in the first place becomes even more eroded. 

Nothing is concrete yet and it could be some time before we see the company make a major move in its Aussie market, but it’s clear a major shake up to the streaming landscapes is in the pipeline. 

The company has stated they want to keep HBO as something of “its own thing” due to a huge brand recognition and appreciation thanks to mega hits such as Game of Thrones. 

How they manage to seamlessly bring the brands together will be interesting, but doing so will give Netflix its biggest competitor yet. 

In Australia, Netflix’s standard subscription price sits at $20.99 a month, so more expensive than both its HBO and Paramount competitors. 

It’s a deal that hasn’t been well received over in Tinseltown where they’re pumping out all these productions. 

Those in the film and TV business have argued the merger is going to reduce competition and subsequently slash hundreds of jobs.

The deal has therefore put a number of protections in place to counter the criticisms, including that Paramount must release 30 new films each year.

Interestingly that agreement says these can’t include AI-generated movies, an ominous sign that such discussions are already happening in the industry. 

Something tells me it won’t be long before we start seeing AI generating content on these major platforms.

Hey, “Skynet” actually sounds like a pretty catchy name for a streaming service. 

News all day, every day at CityNewsQBN.com.au.