As Paramount prepares to take over Warner Bros., the likely merger of HBO Max and Paramount+ would dominate the unscripted television market, new research has found.
Paramount CEO David Ellison revealed in March that he plans to merge the two streaming services giving a combined platform over 200M subscribers.
But the two services also feature a raft of unscripted and reality content and the combination would create a dominant player in that sector. Watch on Deadline
Research house Parrot Analytics has found that if the two services had been combined in the first quarter of 2026, it would have a 25.1% share of demand for unscripted content across the SVOD services.
This puts it above a combination of Hulu and Disney+, which comes in at 22.3%, Netflix’s 14.9% share, Prime Video with 13.3% and Peacock with 11%.
On their own, HBO Max was responsible for 18.7% of that demand with Paramount+ taking 6.5%.
Parrot’s methodology is a collection of data points including video consumption, social media engagement and research actions such as reading about new shows.
This comes despite the fact that the show with the biggest demand on the streaming services in the first quarter was NBC’s The Voice, which streams on Peacock. That title had nearly 45 times more demand than the average title in the market.
Parrot also includes late-night and current affairs shows in its data with The Daily Show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and 60 Minutes contributing to the Paramount+/HBO Max numbers with The Tonight Show contributing to Peacock’s total and Jimmy Kimmel Live! helping the Disney numbers.
America’s Culinary Cup was one of a few new unscripted shows for the network that also included Taylor Sheridan-produced The Road.
Source: deadline.com