David Ellison Calls Skydance “Solution” To Mistakes Ten Years Ago When Big Tech Moved In On Media

Skydance CEO David Ellison said the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery is the solution to media companies that “didn’t pivot fast enough” when big tech moved into their space starting a decade ago.

“We can talk a lot about the owner-operator entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley versus the culture of Hollywood. That candidly put the businesses in this position. This transaction is the solution to those mistakes 10 years ago. Big tech took platform technology pushed into media,” he said in an an interview with CNBC Thursday before executives of merged company now called simply Skydance rang the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange.

“People are still there for the content. They’re there for the stories. They’re there for the news they love, the sports they love, the stories they love. We have assembled an unmatched portfolio of intellectual property, sports, and news assets, and then we are building a product and tech organization that can compete with anybody coming out of Silicon Valley. That is going to enable us to push back, and … to pivot.”

Streaming is the key as Paramount joins HBO Max, vaunting Skydance to a top player in DTC.

“We have incredible room to run here in the States domestically. These services are still nascent internationally, so we have a tremendous amount of room to grow in the international business. Our FAST business is growing rapidly, both in terms of engagement and market share. And … we are investing more in content than any of our peers. Like, just talk about the scale of it: 30 movies a year, over 180 series.

This accelerates streaming growth by years as a standalone company, and you get to that inflection point very, very quickly to where the growth businesses of studios and streams, no, but outpaced linear decline.”

Skydance is unifying ad sales across the platforms and product and tech teams are at work doing the same with the backend tech stacks. “This accelerates streaming growth by years as a standalone company, and you get to that inflection point very, very quickly to where the growth businesses of studios and streaming outpaces linear declines.”