After months of industry and customer speculation, Paramount Skydance has shed some light on the future of the HBO Max and Paramount+ streaming services.

Paramount Skydance completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) today, ending a monthslong saga that began when Netflix last year announced its own plans to buy WBD. Netflix scrapped those plans in February. Skydance is the name of the company created from the $111 billion merger.

In an announcement today, Skydance said that all of the direct-to-consumer streaming services it owns, including the Discovery+ service that Discovery Inc. (which merged with WarnerMedia in 2022 to create WBD) launched in 2021, “will unify into a single service over time.”

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There was a call to boycott Disney last fall. The owner of the ABC network had taken Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air over comments Kimmel made about responses to Charlie Kirk's murder, sending free speech proponents into a frenzy.

Those free speech proponents include me, who, as a reporter, has clear stakes in protecting that right. Although I was on board with halting support for a company I felt had acted wrongfully, truly boycotting Disney proved harder than I expected.

Disney's ubiquity

Canceling Disney+ was simple but threw a hefty wrench into my evening routine. I tend to end many weekdays laughing at comforting sitcom reruns and adult animation. I usually associate Disney with princesses, kids' movies, and, more recently, comic heroes. But Disney also owns Hulu, which exclusively streamed many of my favorite shows for unwinding at the time, like American Dad, Futurama, Living Single, Fresh Off the Boat, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. 

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Companies like AT&T are increasingly using cheap, freely available artificial intelligence models over expensive ones from Anthropic and OpenAI.

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The acquisition of the start-up is an indication of Nvidia’s growing role as Silicon Valley’s central banker and its emphasis on open-source technology.

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After finding antitrust violations, federal courts have been reluctant to impose harsh sanctions. They fear meddling in markets where technology is racing ahead.

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In a long-awaited decision, a federal judge said Google must change its ad tech business to address antitrust issues, but did not disclose the measures.

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The deal is significant for the artificial intelligence industry, uniting Stripe’s payments business with OpenRouter’s helping businesses direct their spending on A.I. models.

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States had opposed an agreement allowing a Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquisition, calling the settlement ineffective and corrupt.

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