David Ellison and other Skydance executives gave a round of presentations to investors and the press this week following the merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. And one topic that came up repeatedly was that the new company’s two major streaming services would be combined into one, still unnamed consumer streaming service at some point in the future.

But no one has discussed what that service might look like and how the company can increase cash flow by merging the two services. As I wrote in my Too Much TV newsletter earlier this week, simply combining the two services into one without discounting the cost of either service would result in one service that would be priced at the top of the market:

Now there is going be some cost savings from consolidating technology, marketing and content spending on the two overlapping services. But those are one times savings and it’s not clear how substantial the savings would be when you weigh those savings against the costs of combining the services and marketing what presumably would be a new name for the service.

One of the first places to look for longtime savings is eliminating some of the current catalog from each service. For instance, if titles are both services, eliminating the costs of licensing them twice would provide some incremental savings.

But a new study from the title and metadata company Reelgood shows that there is currently almost no content overlap between the two streaming services. In fact, the two services only share six titles:

The upside for Skydance is that a new, combined service built from HBO Max and Paramount+ would start with about 5,900 titles, three times what Paramount+ carries on its own, and almost none of them duplicated.

The bad news is that it means to cut costs would require eliminating titles from the service. And that most likely means scripted TV programs and movies, especially one licensed from other studios. 

Due to the lack on unions on unscripted programming, the costs of streaming reality programming is minimal. Assuming that Skydance already the show, it doesn’t have to worry about residuals or other contractual payments that are a part of the scripted television and movie business.

Which likely means that the programs that will be cut are those that receive the least views, or as seen by Skydance executives as non-crucial titles.