Skydance to Launch HBO Max-Paramount+ Bundle by Early Next Year

Skydance will offer an HBO Max-Paramount+ bundle by early next year. CEO David Ellison confirmed the plan on the analyst call for the combined company's third quarter results, one month after Skydance closed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

The timing matters for streaming competitors. HBO Max and Paramount+ currently count a combined 203 million subscribers. That figure places the group in the same league as Amazon Prime, the second largest streaming service worldwide with roughly 200 to 210 million subscribers. Netflix still leads with more than 300 million.

What did the quarter deliver?

The financial results give the bundle its commercial footing. Revenue at Paramount's direct-to-consumer services grew to $2.5 billion for the quarter, up 11% from the year-earlier period, which itself was shaped by the close of the Skydance-Paramount merger in August 2025. Average revenue per user rose 14% and subscriptions increased 6%.

Read those numbers together. Subscriber growth of 6% against ARPU growth of 14% means the company is currently extracting more value per customer than it is adding customers, and the bundle is the mechanism to change that balance at scale.

What did Ellison promise?

Ellison was direct about the bundle's intent, telling analysts consumers "will be delighted" with the offer, which he called "our first step towards combining the two services."

"By bringing these services together, we are well positioned to deliver for a broad range of audience cohorts," Ellison said. "And given this, we really do expect to grow region engagement, improve retention, and increase revenue and profitability, and line with, or ahead of the leading competitors over the long term."

That last clause is the key claim. Ellison positioned the combined entity not as a challenger but as a peer to Netflix and Amazon, with retention and profitability targets set against the market leaders over the long term.

The content argument supports the ambition. The combined catalog spans news, sports and a wide range of popular film and TV franchises, giving the bundle cross-demographic reach few rivals can match on paper.

How will pricing work?

Pricing has not been publicly discussed. Ellison said the company would base it on "discipline and consumer feedback, so we can continue to grow the services" during the bundle phase.

For practitioners, that signals a defensive pricing posture. The company wants bundle adoption without cannibalizing the 14% ARPU growth it just reported, which narrows the room for aggressive discounts.

What happens to linear TV?

Ellison also updated shareholders on the declining linear television business. By 2030, the company expects to move "a meaningful majority of revenue and profit from TV to our streaming and studios businesses."

That is a five-year deadline for a structural pivot. It sets a measurable test for management: streaming and studios must together out-earn linear television before the decade turns.

Will the two services merge into one?

On a full merger of HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single service, Ellison was deliberately vague. "Long-term, the plan is basically to bring them together," he told reporters during the Wall Street call, but added that "it'll take a period of time to do that."

"I think in the immediate [term], you will see them operated separately, with things like bundling or things that you'll be able to see accelerated in the relatively short term," Ellison said. "I can't be specific about that yet today."

The sequence is therefore clear even where the calendar is not. Bundling comes first, early next year. A merged platform follows on an unspecified timeline, with the two services continuing to operate separately in the interim.

For rivals, the near-term threat is churn reduction across a 203-million-subscriber base spanning news, sports and major entertainment franchises, priced with what Ellison calls discipline and launched before the end of the first quarter of next year.