The European Commission has officially given its approval for Paramount’s $111 billion deal to acquire Warner Bros Discovery.
While the Commission has set out caveats to the deal around film production, it said that, in terms of the “AV value chain”, its investigation showed that there are “enough alternative competitors” to offer the new entity sufficient competition.
“In particular regarding the overlap in pay-TV channels for children, the Commission found that streaming platforms offering children’s content will continue to act as a competitive constraint on the merged entity’s TV channels,” said the Commission’s statement.
The deal is still under investigation by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, which is considering whether the deal would result in “a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services”.
Earlier this week, a US federal judge in California put a pause on the deal for 14 days while she considers an antitrust case, brought by 12 attorneys general, arguing that the deal would combine two of Hollywood’s five major film distributors and two of the five major owners of basic cable TV channels, “inflicting substantial harm on movie theatres, basic cable distributors, and ultimately, audiences nationwide”.
