Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison boasted Monday that the media giant will have just over 200 million direct-to-consumer subscribers once his company also acquires Warner Bros. Discovery. If anything, he underestimated. As of the end of 2025, Paramount+ had 78.9 million subscribers and Warner Bros. Discovery Channel had 131.6 million subscribers, which includes linear HBO and Discovery+. So that’s 210.5 million subscribers, not including BET+, which is almost an inconsequential addition. Ellison estimates that number will only get higher by the time the deal closes, which Ellison expects to happen in the third quarter of this year.
All in all, that’s a good number, although it’s still not Netflix, which reportedly had over 325 million subscribers as of December 31. Of course, Netflix is currently available in far more territories (190) than HBO Max (about 90 markets) and Paramount+ (about half). It’s almost certainly significantly smaller than Amazon Prime Video’s overall reach, but Amazon doesn’t share its subscription numbers publicly.
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One of the reasons Ellison may be slightly underestimating is because he’s also slightly overestimating.
Ellison said on the same call that he would combine Paramount+ and HBO Max into one service. To truly understand how many streaming subscribers the combined service will have, we have to eliminate duplication.
Streaming researcher Antenna estimates that Paramount+ has 35.8 million paid subscribers in the United States and HBO Max has 27.1 million paid subscribers in the United States as of January 2026.
Importantly, this does not include HBO’s linear subtitles, which Ellison included in DTC’s catch-all wording. The antenna will not measure cable connections and select bundles, such as those who access Paramount+ with a Walmart+ membership (more details here). It also doesn’t track free trials or subscriptions outside the U.S.
but it Do Track crossover: Antenna estimates that 7.6 million U.S. subscribers have both HBO Max and Paramount+. This means that approximately 27.9% of US HBO Max subscribers already have Paramount+, and 21.1% of US Paramount+ subscribers also pay for HBO Max. All told, nearly 14% of total HBO Max and Paramount+ subscribers already subscribe to the two services. By rights, this should provide imperfect guidance in shared international markets.
The caveat here is that subscriber deduplication does not create an exact one-to-one consolidation of subscription revenue. After all, Paramount+ and HBO Max won’t cost less than Paramount+ or HBO Max Cost. It almost certainly won’t cost Paramount+ either and HBO Max also costs a lot. As ARPU (average revenue per user) rises, so does overall subscription revenue.