The agreement had originally been announced in May of last year, and after the approval of the control organisms and the affirmative vote of the shareholders of both conglomerates, it had its final step in the United States yesterday afternoon.
In concrete terms, the agreement establishes the spin-off of WarnerMedia from the AT&T orbit. Although the latter will retain 71% of the shareholding of the merged company, in practice it rescinds all control and recovers what it paid when it bought it in 2018 for 85,000 million dollars.
Discovery Inc. will pay 43,000 million dollars in cash and will assume, via the emerging Warner Bros. Discovery, another 43,000 million in debt.
AT&T thus abandons its brief dream of vertically integrating telecommunications and entertainment, will pay part of its immense liabilities -which according to the specialized magazine Variety amounted to 156,200 million at the end of 2021- and will invest in its original business, mainly in the development and deployment of networks 5G.
For the global media map, the rise of Warner Bros. Discovery marks a new chapter in the much-touted “streaming war,” which in just a few short years has seen numerous mergers, platform launches, and exponential growth in development and filming of titles that feed the catalogs of the different brands.
Where Netflix reigns, the traditional media conglomerates, whose power dates back in most cases to a century ago with the founding of the great Hollywood studios, such as The Walt Disney Company, Paramount Global, NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia, jumped into the fray.
The new Warner Bros. Discovery, which begins trading on the stock market on Monday, will bring together in one space brands such as HBO, HBO Max, CNN, Warner Bros. studios, DC Films, New Line Cinema, TBS, TNT and Cartoon Network along with Discovery Channel, HGTV, Discovery Home & Health, Food Network, TLC, Investigation Discovery, Travel Channel, Turbo, Animal Planet, among more.
It was announced that both catalogues, of a diversity that is estimated to allow them to compete on an equal footing with Netflix and Disney, will be brought together on a single streaming platform.
Of course, the merger will have its effects in the coming months in the rest of the markets, including Latin America.
Source: Ambito
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