Paramount Skydance Chairman David Ellison bragged on Monday that once his company also owned Warner Bros. Discovery, the media giant will have just over 200 million direct-to-consumer subscribers. If anything, it was undersold. At the end of 2025, Paramount+ had 78.9 million subscribers, and Warner Bros. Discovery has 131.6 million subscribers, including linear HBO and Discovery+. So that’s 210.5 million subscribers, not counting BET+, which would be an almost immaterial addition. By the time the deal closes, which Ellison estimates will be in the third quarter of this year, the number should rise.
Overall, that’s a good number, though not yet Netflix, which reported it had surpassed 325 million subscribers as of December 31. And of course, Netflix is currently available in more regions (190) than HBO Max (about 90 markets) and Paramount+ (about half that). It’s almost certainly much smaller than Amazon Prime Video’s overall range, but Amazon doesn’t share its subscription numbers publicly.
One reason Ellison’s sales are down a bit is that he’s somewhat overselling.
Ellison said on the same conference call that he would combine Paramount+ and HBO Max into one service. To get a real idea of how many live streaming subscribers the combined service will get, one has to remove the duplication.
Streaming researcher Antenna estimates that as of January 2026, Paramount+ had 35.8 million paying subscribers in the US, where HBO Max had 27.1 million paid subscribers.
Importantly, this doesn’t include HBO’s linear subs, which Ellison included in the DTC catchphrase. The antenna does not measure cable branches and “selects the beams,” he says, without adding further selection to the beams. It also does not track free trials or subscriptions outside the United States
But it is He does Crossing paths: Antenna estimates that 7.6 million US subscribers have both HBO Max and Paramount+. This means that about 27.9% of HBO Max subscribers in the US already have Paramount+, and 21.1% of Paramount+ subscribers in the US also pay for HBO Max. In total, roughly 14 percent of all subscribers here between HBO Max and Paramount+ are already subscribers to both services. It stands to reason that this should be directed, imperfectly, in common international markets.
It is important to note here that deduplication of subscriber data will not result in accurate consolidation of subscription revenue. After all, Paramount+ and HBO Max won’t cost as much as Paramount+ or The cost of HBO Max. It also certainly won’t cost as much as the Paramount+ and HBO Max costs too. As ARPU (average revenue per user) rises, overall subscription revenue will follow.
