A New Major Streaming Service Is On The Way: Say Goodbye to HBO Max (Again)

The aftermath of the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery deal

Disney+ and Hulu are set to merge into one super-streaming service later this year. But Disney isn’t the only entertainment giant looking to consolidate in 2026. Paramount+ already merged with SHOWTIME a couple of years ago, and now it’s positioned to do the same with HBO Max.

The CEO of Paramount Skydance and classic nepo baby David Ellison announced his plans for the newly acquired Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) assets during a conference call on Monday. And the rumors are true: Paramount+ and HBO Max are merging into a single streaming app. Let’s dive into the details.

Paramount+ and HBO Max will merge into one service

We recently covered the tumultuous deal between Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Skydance. The TL;DR? Netflix was all set to buy Warner Bros. from WBD, but Paramount Skydance stole it out from under them at the last minute.

Each company has been holding town halls and conference calls to reassure its employees about next steps, and all eyes were on David Ellison this Monday as he outlined his plans for the newly combined company.

Yes, he confirmed, Paramount+ and HBO Max will merge into one big streaming service. Ellison claims the new service will have over 200 million subscribers, combining Paramount’s 78.9 million and HBO Max/Discovery+’s 131.6 million, although this doesn’t account for subscriber overlap.

We don’t know what this new service will be called or how much it will cost, but considering how similar situations have gone in the past, it’ll be pretty expensive. HBO Max alone is already one of the most expensive streaming services out there, often more expensive than Netflix, and has been since it merged with Discovery+ (but more on that later).

Mergers are tough …

When Paramount+ absorbed SHOWTIME in 2023, four years after the merger of Viacom and CBS, it originally created a brand-new subscription tier called Paramount+ with SHOWTIME. “SHOWTIME” as a standalone brand no longer existed. Even the premium cable channel was rebranded as Paramount+ with SHOWTIME.

However, that branding didn’t last very long. The Paramount+ with SHOWTIME tier is now called Paramount+ Premium, which was also the name of the service’s ad-free tier before Paramount+ with SHOWTIME replaced it. Paramount must have come to the conclusion that the SHOWTIME brand name had outlived its usefulness.

It brings to mind the branding fiasco that Warner Bros. Discovery had a few years ago, when Discovery first bought Warner Bros. The original plan was to merge Discovery+ with HBO Max into a new service called simply “Max.” This caused a lot of public backlash, so WBD compromised: Discovery+ would exist as a standalone service, but its catalog would be added to HBO Max, and this reinvented streamer would still drop the “HBO” branding.

This was a terrible idea. Max is that girl from “Stranger Things,” not a streaming service. And the HBO brand is so iconic! WBD eventually realized its mistake and reverted the name back to HBO Max in 2025. The name change didn’t even last long enough for us to change our review’s URL.

… But HBO will be fine, probably

So everything is back to the way it was—why am I bringing this all up now? Because during his conference call on Monday, Ellison said that “HBO should stay HBO,” reassuring the company that he has no plans to diminish the HBO brand and that it will “operate with independence.”

However, I don’t know if I 100% believe him. WBD and Paramount Skydance have both cut their premium cable brands’ names before—WBD with HBO and Paramount with SHOWTIME—and it seems unlikely that they’ll smash every name together for the new service. I’d be very surprised if they named it “HBO Paramount Discovery Max with SHOWTIME.” Something’s got to give.

So while HBO might “stay HBO” in a technical sense, still producing the same types of content, the brand itself might be overshadowed by all of the other assets that the new, oversized company will own. And whatever name they go with, I’d also be surprised if it lasted for more than a few years before becoming something else. There’s nothing more HBO than a rebrand, after all.

What about the cable networks?

Under the now-defunct Netflix deal, WBD’s cable networks would have split off into a different company from its streaming ventures. That means that Netflix would have had nothing to do with the cable news network CNN.

However, Paramount Skydance’s bid was different. Paramount offered to purchase the entirety of WBD, keeping its streaming and cable businesses combined. So now Paramount, which already owns CBS News, is also going to own CNN.

So is Ellison going to sell off the cable networks? Apparently not. “There’s [sic] no plans to divest or spin off a package of cable assets at this time,” said Paramount Skydance’s Chief Strategy Officer Andy Gordon on Monday.

This makes sense—control over WBD’s cable networks means control over CNN, and control over CNN means a lot of influence over American politics. It’s worth noting that David Ellison’s father is a Trump ally and recently moved closer to Mar-a-Lago, and that David Ellison once assured the Trump administration that he’d “make sweeping changes to CNN.”

President Trump has disapproved of CNN’s coverage in the past, calling it a “political arm of the Democrat Party.” It stands to reason that his allies at Paramount might try to turn CNN into a Republican asset after the merger, becoming much more like Fox News.

It’s also unclear whether Paramount is still backed by the governments of three Middle Eastern countries that supported its initial bid at the end of 2025. According to Business Insider, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi offered $24 billion to help Paramount Skydance acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, and no one knows the terms of that deal or whether it carried over to the final sale. But if it did, that would mean three foreign governments might control a major American news source.

The political implications could become seismic, deepening the fissures already yawning throughout American society.

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