HBO Max and Paramount+ will be sold as one bundle in early 2027, Skydance says

Viewers who now pay separately for HBO Max and Paramount+ will be able to get both with one subscription starting in early 2027, Skydance said Monday. The company that now owns both services announced the bundle in a letter to shareholders released with its third-quarter results.

What the company did not say is what most subscribers will want to know. Skydance gave no price, no launch date beyond early next year and no word on whether the package will include ad-supported versions. Both services sell cheaper plans with ads and pricier ad-free tiers today, so how those tiers are combined will decide how good the deal turns out to be.

"Starting in early 2027, consumers will be able to subscribe to both world-class streaming services at an even greater value," the company wrote. It said more details on the bundle and its wider streaming plans would come in the coming months.

A bundle now, a single service later

Skydance CEO David Ellison made clear on a call with Wall Street analysts that the bundle is a stopgap. He called it "our first step towards unifying the two services" and said executives think consumers "will be delighted" with it.

Ellison has said before that the long-term goal is to fold HBO Max and Paramount+ into one platform. When the merger closed, he said that work would take time and that the two services would run separately in the near term, with bundling likely to come sooner. "Long-term, the plan is basically to bring them together," he said then.

Starting with a bundle looks like the sensible order. Merging two streaming platforms means combining apps, account systems, billing and content libraries, and that takes years. A bundle lets Skydance start selling the combined catalog now, while it tests how many people actually want both services before it commits to a full merger.

Skydance completed its roughly $110 billion combination of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery in early October. The bundle is among the first big moves it has announced since then.

Two very different catalogs

The pitch rests on the idea that the two services serve different viewers. HBO Max is known for prestige drama: "Game of Thrones," "The Sopranos," "Euphoria" and "The White Lotus," plus talk shows from John Oliver and Bill Maher. Paramount+ leans on broader fare, including CBS programming, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central shows, Taylor Sheridan dramas such as "Landman," "Tulsa King" and "Mayor of Kingstown," and a run of "Star Trek" series. Ellison said the bundle would cover entertainment, news and sports, and he named Harry Potter and "The Pitt" as anchor titles.

Ellison called them "highly complementary offerings" that over-index with different consumer segments and different parts of the country. He said putting them together should lift engagement, improve retention and grow revenue and profitability over time.

That argument is persuasive for a bundle and less so for a merged service. A bundle works well when two audiences barely overlap: each side gets an easy upsell, and anyone who wants only one service can still buy it alone. A single service is harder, because it asks one group of subscribers to pay for programming built for the other. Warner Bros. Discovery ran into a version of this problem when it put Discovery's reality shows on the same platform as HBO's dramas and renamed the service Max, a brand it later dropped in favor of the HBO name. That experience should make Skydance careful about pushing the two catalogs any closer together than a discount bundle.

Size is the other selling point. The two services reach a combined 203 million subscribers, the company said. That is still well behind Netflix, but it makes the combined business more competitive with Disney and Amazon's Prime Video.

On pricing, Ellison said Skydance would "phase in new plans for pricing, with discipline and consumer feedback" during the bundle period. That wording leaves room for price changes on the standalone services too. Subscribers should not assume today's prices are fixed while the company works out what the combined offer will cost.

The bundle also leaves open what happens to other packages. HBO Max is currently sold in a bundle with Disney+ and Hulu, which was an early case of rival media companies selling their services together. Skydance did not say whether that deal will continue. Ellison said the company would look at such arrangements and judge whether they create value for shareholders. Disney is now a direct competitor of a much bigger company, so it would not be surprising if that bundle came under pressure. For now, though, nothing about it has changed.

The streaming numbers behind the announcement are hard to read because the merger closed after the quarter ended. On a pro forma basis, which treats Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount as if they had combined on Jan. 1, 2025, Skydance said direct-to-consumer revenue grew 15% in the third quarter from a year earlier. For the current fourth quarter, the company said it expects continued strong growth in that division.

On its own, Paramount's streaming revenue rose 11% from the year-earlier quarter to $2.5 billion. Average revenue per user climbed 14% and subscribers rose 6%. Skydance said declines at Showtime and the folding of BET+ into Paramount+ held back total streaming growth by 6%. The streaming unit posted $225 million in adjusted EBITDA, a 9% margin. The company said that figure reflected heavier spending on programming, including UFC rights and original shows.

Those figures explain the urgency. Skydance said it expects that by 2030, a meaningful majority of its revenue and profit will come from streaming and studios rather than traditional TV, because cable viewing and TV advertising keep shrinking. A 9% margin on streaming is thin for a business that is supposed to carry most of the company's profit within a few years. A bundle that keeps subscribers from canceling is one of the cheaper ways to raise it, which is why the price Skydance chooses next year will matter more than the announcement itself.