Less than two years after the respective launches of both HBO Max and Discovery+, their soon-to-merge parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, has decided the single life just won’t do. Gunnar Wiedenfels, Discovery’s top finance bro and incoming CFO of the combined company, confirmed that the two streaming services would face the great capitalist dystopia hand in hand join forces, answering the first question we had when news of the merger broke. Wiedenfels’s comments — made at a banking conference and first reported by Variety — didn’t outline the particulars of what such a combined service would look like, but did confirm that the roll-up would likely start with a bundle before the services are fully integrated.
“Right out of the gate, we’re working on getting the bundling approach ready, maybe a single sign-on, maybe ingesting content into the other product, etc., so that we can start to get some benefits early on,” he told a Palm Beach audience on Monday in partly cloudy Florida. “But the main thrust is going to be harmonizing the technology platform. Building one very, very strong combined direct-to-consumer product and platform, that’s going to take a while.” (By “a while,” he means once the merger is finalized, which could take another month or so; Discovery shareholders just voted to approve it on Friday.) We’ve reached out to HBO Max and Discovery+ for comment on this new capitalist future, and will update this piece if they have any other thoughts on it.
