>As Netflix and Disney cement their leads over an array of rivals in the video-streaming market, top executives at Comcast and its NBCUniversal arm are in a quandary. Only 11.3 million households regularly watch NBCU’s Peacock service, far fewer than use competing services, according to recent internal data viewed by The Information. NBCU wants to ramp up Peacock’s growth, particularly among paying users, but without spending a lot of money.>Its solution is to strike deals with other entertainment companies to broaden either Peacock’s programming or its distribution. Last month NBCU unveiled programming deals for Peacock with World Wrestling Entertainment and A&E. And over the past several months, NBCU has pitched ViacomCBS, among other companies, about offering their streaming services in a bundle with Peacock at a discounted rate, either in the U.S. or abroad, say people familiar with the situation. All these efforts raise the prospect that NBCU could pursue a merger with another firm, such as WarnerMedia, at some point.>There’s reason to think that may happen. Before entertainment industry veteran Jeff Shell became CEO of NBCU at the start of 2020, he told colleagues that NBCU needed to merge with WarnerMedia to have enough scale to compete, say people with direct knowledge of the discussions.>People on Wall Street and in the entertainment industry say a merger of the two companies feels inevitable.>NBCU and WarnerMedia are roughly equal in size. Each generated close to $30 billion in revenue last year. Each owns a major film and TV studio and a portfolio of cable channels including news channels. Combining the two companies would produce a giant with total revenues about the same as those of Disney, which had $65 billion in revenue in its fiscal 2020 year.>https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nbcuniversals-streaming-strategy-raise-prospect-of-warnermedia-mergerIs a WWE-AEW partnership the new forbidden door?
Won't happen... while a certain someone owns the majority
>>12956523I thought Disney owned NBC??
>>12956745ABC
>>12956523This is exactly how Hulu started in the first place. A bunch of studios got together and created a streaming platform with each one owning a piece of it. Fox owned 30%, NBCU another 30%, Disney owned 30%, and Time Warner owned 10%. Once Disney bought Fox they ended up with 60% and now have control.
>>12956745Comcast own NBC and soon WWE
>>12956881Yeah, with the two deals they now have with WWE, it will make sense to just buy WWE outright instead of paying so much for the content. I think they will wait until the Fox Deal for Smackdown is almost done and then make the purchase. Then they can move Smackdown to an NBCU channel.
>>12956523If anything an ECW TNN type big leaguing politicking is what would happen. I,e Vince gets NBC to drop AEW in favor of only them because they're the bigger name and they won't liscense their content to NBC anymore until AEW is dropped.
>>12957794Or another point is WWE may have included a clause in their NBC contract that locks them in as the only wrestling content on the platform.
>>12957794Well thing is HBOMax is definitely the bigger platform than Peacock, so it would be more likely merging Peacock's content into HBOMax
