{"id":79603,"date":"2026-10-06T15:24:20","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T14:24:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/?p=79603"},"modified":"2026-10-06T21:53:31","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T20:53:31","slug":"hbo-max-and-paramount-what-it-might-mean-for-sports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/hbo-max-and-paramount-what-it-might-mean-for-sports\/","title":{"rendered":"HBO Max and Paramount+: What It Might Mean For Sports"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Today the deal was done, and Paramount took over<\/a> Warner Bros. Discovery in a massive deal that has much of Hollywood quaking. There were some last minute wrinkles with a deal being struck a couple of weeks ago with a group of US Attorneys General, with the general view being that they folded and didn’t get a great deal from their negotiations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The merger will undoubtedly see many job losses with duplication between divisions being eliminated. While film production is set to remain quite high, exactly what budgets those films will have is another question. While there are some limitations in the deal, I’d just note that Hallmark makes 30+ Christmas films each year. They’re just all really cheap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is also a significant question over one company owning both CBS News and CNN, especially when the former has had an “interesting” new executive in charge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I wanted to veer away and consider what this all might mean for sports television and in particular, sports TV in the UK. Because prior to this merger, UEFA had announced that Paramount+ would be the new home for the Champions’ League from 2027. Warner Bros Discovery’s TNT Sports had been a major holder of the rights since 2015 when, as BT Sport, it had exclusivity. In the most recent renewal, they lost one game a week to Amazon’s Prime TV service (this continues under the new deal), but still kept the rest. They also had the entirety of the rest of UEFA’s other club competitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But they lost not only their UCL rights package to Paramount+, but also those other UEFA club competitions to Sky Sports. That would have left a massive hole in their sports armoury, with really just a single weekly Premier League fixture alongside a grab-bag of other rights including cycling, rugby union, snooker and various winter sports. Without that European club football, it would have been really hard for TNT to continue to charge \u00a330+ a month for a sports package.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But now, with TNT Sports falling under a new combined Skydance entity, it remains to be seen what happens next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the expectation might be that HBO Max and Paramount+ merge into a single platform, that hasn’t yet been announced (Update: In fact, Skydance has said that they will. In a press release that was published after I wrote this, they say that there will be “significant improvements to its direct-to-consumer streaming products, which will unify into a single service over time<\/em>“), and indeed, they might want to add up-sells to each other’s platforms. HBO Max has vastly more programming that Paramount+ and I would suspect has a bigger footprint in the UK than Paramount+ too, even though the latter has been around longer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sky has been important for both of them. It shares some programming with HBO Max, and provides its subscribers with access to its basic ad tier. It also<\/em> provides Paramount+ to its Sky Movies subscribers. These deals also ensure that a flow of Warners and Paramount films reach its premium movie services. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’d be surprised if these bundling deals weren’t the single biggest source of subscribers that each platform has in the UK.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it might make sense for the UCL rights to remain with TNT Sports and that to be an up-sell within both HBO Max (as it essentially does today) and also Paramount+, until such time as the two are merged into one app. In any case, Paramount+ does not have any other sports programming, which makes it tough ask for consumers to pay for it. You’d be paying for sports on a platform that UCL rights and essentially nothing else sport related. Paramount+ is still pretty cheap in the UK starting at \u00a35.99 for the ad tier, but there really isn’t much on the service. Even Apple TV has more sport with MLS and MLB (but not F1 in the UK).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would expect the production to merge with the Paramount+\/CBS production that has Micah Richards and Thierry Henry in the US. That’s all produced in Europe anyway. Whether TNT Sports becomes the combined entity’s primary sporting brand is another question. That will be led by the US I would guess. There, TNT Sports has NHL, MLB, NCAA basketball and NASCAR amongst other things. They notably lost NBA rights in the not-too-distant past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One way or another, they’ll need something in place by the start of next season, so getting this deal over the line now makes that a little easier. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now the question is what other sports offering might the new combined entity go after? I’m still not sure that they have enough in the UK market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One further thing of note in the world of TV sport is the lack of coverage of UEFA Nations League fixtures that don’t feature the home nations. ITV shows England, while the BBC has most of the other countries. But if you wanted to watch fixtures such as France vs Italy or Portugal vs Norway, over the last week or so, you had to search long and hard to find them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sky Sports once had a lot of this, but no longer. There was nothing on TNT Sports, and Premier Sports who pick up some football had nothing. Not even DAZN had the games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, if you want to watch Croatia vs Spain this evening, you have to pay \u00a32.49 on Amazon’s Prime Video to watch it as a pay-per-view event. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That feels very hidden away. Although scrolling through Amazon, I can also watch various Ligue 1 and Bundesliga fixtures on the platform at the same price. The latter has various rights deal including with the BBC and YouTube, and Ligue 1 rights have been a basket case for years, not least in France! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don’t know how much UEFA was charging for those non-home nations fixtures, but it was clearly more than the major sports TV channels could stomach. My suspicion is that there will have been more viewers via dodgy “fire sticks” than the official Prime PPV route.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo above of the PGE Narodowy stadium in Warsaw where I recently watched a very poor Poland vs Bosnia 0-0 fixture. Lewandowski only turned on his skills for the following match which saw Poland beat Romania 6-0 including a Lewandowski hattrick.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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