What Audience Behavior Tells Us About a HBO Max-Paramount+ Combo | Charts

With the industry looking ahead to the ways that a Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger will play out, we took a look at how compatible their flagship streaming services are.  The data suggests that a future combination of HBO Max and Paramount+ would be inherently synergistic. From both a demographic and viewing behavior perspective, the two platforms already look more similar than others. Ultimately this is a positive indicator for any future efforts to consolidate these streamers.

The first signal of compatibility is the “who.” Parrot Analytics’ audience demographic data shows that HBO Max and Paramount+ occupy similar real estate in the streaming landscape when it comes to the demographics of audiences for their content.

Both platforms have an audience that skews slightly male and is older than the audience of most other platforms. While Peacock occupies a similar age bracket, its heavy female skew sets it apart, leaving Max and Paramount+ as the most congruent pair in the field.

Being different is often the goal for a consolidation like this (think of it as “buying” the users you don’t have). However, being the same offers a big defensive advantage. A combined catalog doesn’t seek to expand the tent so much as it reinforces the center. It eliminates the fragmentation of the 35-to-55-year-old adult demographic, turning two separate apps into a single destination for the viewer whose tastes bridge the gap between HBO’s prestige dramas and Paramount’s procedural powerhouses.

The most compelling argument for this merger, however, isn’t just who the audience is, but how they move between platforms. To measure the friction between platforms it helps to start with a platform’s “Internal Affinity” (eg. what share of Disney+ users watch another Disney+ title next?) and compare it against its “Cross-Platform Affinity” (eg. how often a Hulu user jumps to Disney+).

The results paint a clear picture. Despite being offered as a bundle for years, Disney+ and Hulu remain silos. A Hulu viewer is less than half as likely to go and watch a title available on Disney+ compared to a person who already watched something on Disney+. 

In some ways, this isn’t necessarily surprising in the case of Disney+. It is a smaller platform with a more focused content offering specifically catering to franchise fandoms likely to stay within the ecosystem. After years of trying to justify Disney+ and Hulu as separate platforms with distinct purposes in the U.S. it should not be surprising that audiences have developed siloed viewing behaviors.

Contrast the Disney+/Hulu example with the frictionless bridge between HBO Max and Paramount+. An HBO Max viewer is 86.7% as likely to watch a Paramount+ title as a core Paramount+ viewer is. The behavioral friction here is remarkably low. We aren’t looking at two distinct silos that require a heavy lift to unite. Instead, we see a highly compatible audience that is already habituated to both catalogs.

For the streaming strategy of a combined WBD and Paramount, this data offers a “good news/bad news” scenario.

The bad news is that a merger won’t “expand the tent” in the way a merger with a platform like Netflix might have. There are few new frontiers to conquer here. The good news, however, is that the data points to a more seamless integration between HBO Max and Paramount+. Marketing spend becomes exponentially more efficient when you aren’t trying to speak two different languages.

As profitability replaces growth as streaming’s primary metric, the HBO Max-Paramount+ union represents a synergy play. It is a logical consolidation of two deeply overlapping audiences into a unified front that stops competing for the same viewers and starts owning them.

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