WarnerMedia-Discovery merger: What’s behind it, how it may affect TV streaming

AT&T plans to spin off WarnerMedia, which it bought five years ago, and merge it with Discovery in a $100 billion deal.

AT&T plans to spin off WarnerMedia, which it bought five years ago, and merge it with Discovery in a $100 billion deal. Photo by Shutterstock.

AT&T will spin off WarnerMedia (the parent company of HBO, CNN, and Warner Brothers film studio) and merge it with Discovery (which owns HGTV, TLC, and Animal Planet) to create a new company. 

This is a $100 billion deal that might lead to new programming and a restructuring of current content libraries. That’s according to Alejandro Rojas, director of applied analytics at Parrot Analytics.

“Everybody's trying to get people's attention, and everybody's trying to become that first destination. To kind of figure out who's gonna win, I mean, I think probably there's room for everybody. … But at the end of the day … if you create good content, people are gonna flock to that. Great storytelling always wins,” he tells KCRW.  

From this Episode:

Credits

Host:

Madeleine Brand

Producers:

Sarah Sweeney, Angie Perrin, Michell Eloy, Amy Ta, Rosalie Atkinson, Brian Hardzinski, Bennett Purser