Earlier this year, the merger of AT&T's (T -2.67%) WarnerMedia with Discovery (DISC.A) (DISC.B) (DISCK) was given the green light by U.S. regulators. In this clip from "The M&A Show" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on March 18, Fool.com contributors Travis Hoium and Jason Hall discuss the megadeal and how the two media companies will combine forces.
Travis Hoium: Yeah. The other move that is near closing is WarnerMedia, the spinoff from AT&T merging with Discovery that will create another streaming service, HBO Max, I believe is now what it's called. It's gone through 18 different names. But HBO Max is the flagship of that group. I don't know exactly how you combine all those assets. This is what's a little bit interesting. Here is a lot of these services are combining assets that don't necessarily fit together as they're constructed today, so does that mean you do more acquisitions in the future?
When Disney (DIS 0.22%) Plus came out, they had Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, they bifurcated the content, like do they start to do things like that? Apple (AAPL 0.41%) TV has channels. We're seeing how this starts to play out, but we're not quite there yet. We're still in this free-for-all phase where companies are now trying to scoop up assets. Disney was a buyer two decades ago, they really started the content acquisition train. Now we're seeing with Marvel.
Jason Hall: Right, that was the first one.
Hoium: That was the first one, then it was Pixar, and then Star Wars after that. Now you're seeing companies like Amazon (AMZN 1.35%) go okay, well, we want to play with everybody else as they're collecting assets, we need to collect assets too.
It'll be interesting to see how that plays out, and how even from a user perspective because I think right now there's a lot of mishmash together. Even under a Disney Plus. [laughs] They've thought a lot about that operation.
