AT&T and Discovery establish a streaming media giant worth 150 billion US dollars

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According to people familiar with the matter, AT&T is about to reach an agreement to merge its content unit Warner Media with its competitor Discovery to create a media giant with an enterprise value of $150 billion, only in the acquisition of CNN, HBO and Warner Bros (Warner Bros) a few years later.

Two people with direct knowledge of the matter said that AT&T’s board of directors met on Sunday to approve the transaction. People familiar with the matter said that the agreement is expected to be announced in the next few days.

The merger will merge one of Hollywood’s most valuable catalogs-covering Warner Bros. film studios and television studios, the HBO network, and a combination of cable channels including CNN-together with Discovery, with Discovery targeting non-scripted cooking and The family’s new streaming media service has been successfully decorated and displayed.

After watching Netflix’s dominance in streaming media for many years, the world’s largest media and technology companies are seeking to fight back with their own services. In the past year and a half, Disney, Apple, WarnerMedia, Comcast, Discovery and other companies have launched streaming platforms to compete for the future of entertainment.

The structure of the transaction is not yet clear, but AT&T has a market value of approximately $230 billion and is expected to control most of the merged entity. The market value of Discovery is $24 billion.

AT&T decided to merge its content division with Discovery five years after it agreed to take over Time Warner $85.4 billion The telecommunications company hopes to transform itself into the world’s largest vertically integrated content and distribution company.

In 2019, AT&T CEO John Stankey and Discovery head David Zaslav discussed ways to incorporate its programming into a single streaming service for about $8 per month (excluding HBO). However, when Disney revealed that it was willing to provide Disney Plus with its massive “Star Wars”, Pixar, Marvel and Disney classic series for only $7 a month, they abandoned this plan. Instead, Stankey combined HBO with the rest of WarnerMedia’s program production into a product called HBO Max.

Bloomberg first reported the news of AT&T’s negotiation with Discovery. AT&T and Discovery declined to comment.

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