Tag: merger
SPAC Maquia adjourns deadline extension vote to Nov. 4 amid merger talks
Warner Bros.’ Streamers Hit 95 Million Subscribers, Moves Up Merger Date
Warner Bros. Discovery reached a new high in its subscriber count across HBO, HBO Max, and Discovery+, the company revealed during its latest earnings call, certainly thanks in part to the popularity of the new Game of Thrones series House of the Dragon (via Variety).
In the July 1 – September 30 quarter, the company’s three streaming services climbed to nearly 95 million subscribers total, growing by nearly 3 million worldwide; just 500,000 of that number is domestic. This comes despite the studio pulling a notable amount of content from the service, including original animation and movies, as well as famously canceling the live-action Batgirl film, which had finished principal photography.
Warner Bros. Discovery reported a net loss of $2.3 billion in the third quarter, including “$1.92 billion of pre-tax amortization from acquisition-related intangible assets and $1.52 billion million tied to pre-tax restructuring and other charges,” according to Variety.
The date of the big HBO Max and Discovery Plus merger moved up
In an earnings call today, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav announced that the merging of HBO Max and Discovery Plus was going so well that the target date for the launch of the new service would be moving from summer 2023 to spring 2023.
From their user interface to their backend to their content, the two services are extraordinarily different, with HBO Max likely leading Discovery Plus in subscriptions as it had approximately 76.8 million users in April before the acquisition, and the combined services now have 94.9 million subscribers. But Zaslav’s plan has always been to merge the two services, which his team views as targeting very different markets. Early this year, a slide claiming HBO Max skewed male and Discovery Plus…
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The T-Mobile / Sprint merger hasn’t created jobs — it’s cut thousands
The Wall Street Journal reports T-Mobile’s engineering and network operations teams are experiencing waves of layoffs, which have included managers and executives, on top of thousands of jobs eliminated by restructuring after the company merged with Sprint in 2020. T-Mobile execs promised then that the merger was “all about creating new, high-quality, high-paying jobs, and the new T-Mobile will be jobs-positive from Day One and every day thereafter.”
In April 2020, the companies had about 80,000 workers combined; however, as the Journal points out, T-Mobile’s most recent annual report (pdf) said it ended 2021 with 75,000 full- and part-time employees.
Employees
As of December 31, 2021, we employed approximately 75,000 full-time and…