A merger of Paramount+ and Max would unleash a formidable new streaming product on the market. Such a combined service is more than just a pie-in-the-sky idea, as this week it was reported that Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery were in talks about potentially merging their two streamers into one. If Max and Paramount+ were to join together in a new streaming product, it would raise fascinating questions about which sports were allowed to play on the hypothetical service. If it were allowed to stream everything currently on Paramount+ and Max, this new offering could have NFL, NHL, and MLB games, college sports including football from the Big Ten, the entire NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, U.S. Men’s and Women’s Soccer, and much more.

Key Details:

• The amount of sports content that could show on a new streaming platform depends on existing contracts between Paramount, WBD, and leagues.
• A merger could allow NFL games now on CBS to stream on Venu Sports.
• Acquiring Paramount+’s sports rights would make a failed pursuit of the NBA sting much less for WBD.

If Paramount+ and Max were to merge, clearly much of the content from both services would appear on the newly combined platform. But contracts for sports rights tend to be more complicated, which would make this process less clear. WBD and Paramount would likely need to examine the contracts and consult the individual leagues before making any final decisions about what streams where.

Let’s assume for the sake of this exercise that the new platform would be allowed to offer all of the sports currently streaming on Paramount+ and Max, including contests that stream live from CBS on the Paramount+ with SHOWTIME plan. It would instantly become one of the leading providers of live sports among on-demand streaming services, boasting a lineup that even Peacock would look at with envy.

What Sports Rights Would a Paramount+ and Max Service Offer?

Any discussion of sports rights on a streaming service must start with the most popular TV product in the United States: the NFL. Paramount+ streams all in-market NFL games appearing on CBS on Sunday afternoons, and winning the rights to offer the NFL — even if only tangentially — would be a monumental get for WBD. The company would be able to own Sundays, with football games in the afternoon and early evening, followed by a new episode of HBO’s latest prestige television show on Sunday nights.

On the college sports front, a Paramount+ and Max combo would be able to stream all games from the annual NCAA Men’s March Madness tournament each year. Currently, those games are split between Paramount’s CBS and WBD’s TNT, TBS, and truTV; bringing them together on one service would be an undoubted boon for college basketball fans. WBD also struck a deal in late June to televise dozens of men’s and women’s basketball games from the Big East, bolstering college roundball inventory on the new service even more. CBS offers a wide range of college football games from the Big Ten and other conferences, and WBD recently agreed with ESPN on a pact that will allow it to sublicense several College Football Playoff games each year. Additionally, earlier this week, WBD announced it would become a broadcast partner of Mountain West football starting in 2024.

The merged streamer would also carry an impressive selection of global soccer games. Paramount+ carries the UEFA Champions League in the United States, while WBD holds the rights to air games from the men’s and women’s U.S. Soccer teams. Paramount+ also streams matches from Concacaf, the Argentine Primera División, the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), Serie A, and the Scottish Professional Football League (SPFL).

WBD holds the rights to auto racing from NASCAR, regular season and playoff games from the NHL and MLB, and recently became the U.S. broadcast partner of the French Open tennis tournament starting in 2025. The variety available on a service merged with Paramount+ would be truly epic, and it could even allow WBD to bring the CBS Sunday afternoon NFL package to Venu Sports, the joint venture service it is creating with Disney and Fox, although that seems less likely to get immediate NFL approval.

Both WBD and Paramount would gain from such an arrangement. WBD would get its hands on huge sports rights without having to pay through the nose for them, and Paramount would gain nearly 100 million new streaming customers and their attendant revenues. But the triumph would be all the sweeter for WBD CEO David Zaslav, who has seen his 2022 quote that his company didn’t “have to have the NBA” thrown in his face repeatedly in recent months. WBD appears poised to lose NBA rights starting in 2025, despite exploring every potential avenue for keeping them.

A merger of Paramount+ and Max may never happen at all, and if it does there could be multiple obstacles that keep some or all of the sports mentioned above off the new service. But if WBD and Paramount Global are allowed to put all of their sports on a merged streaming platform, it would create a streamer that very few sports fans could ignore.