Earlier this year, the merger of AT&T's (T +0.00%) WarnerMedia with Discovery (DISC.A +0.00%) (DISC.B +0.00%) (DISCK +0.00%) 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: 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 +0.05%) 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 +0.11%) 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 0.41%) go OK, 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.
