The Paramount Skydance merger talks have been halted by the Paramount side.
What went wrong: The US government allowed studios to own streaming and broadcast channels. This resulted in extreme fragmentation of the market where programs were no longer sold on the open market and every studio felt like they had to open their own streaming channel to compete.
It didn’t work when studios owned movie theaters and so that was outlawed. Now we’ve come full circle and studios can buy movie theaters. That’s not going to save the theaters because the studio is going to put their product out for a week before shuffling it off to their streaming channel. Or worse, cancel it for a write off rather than let it air on competing networks.
A side effect of so many streaming channels is that they are all feeling the pressure to keep up with the catalog depth of Netflix and Disney/Hulu. This results in lots of mediocre content being produced to create the illusion of lots of stuff to watch. But no one wants to watch it or hasn’t heard of it to build mind hype for it. All that content is wasted money to prop up a failing service that is bleeding every contender dry. There will be more like Paramount. Consolidation is coming.