At long last, the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery has reached its final chapter.
On Thursday, the WBD board announced that it has deemed Paramount’s latest bid of $31 per share as “superior” to the deal it agreed to with Netflix late last year. Just hours later, Netflix officially pulled its offer to purchase WBD.
We’ll spare you the details of Paramount’s new offer, but the short of it is that the company increased its proposal by $1.00 per share and included a number of provisions that protect WBD in the event its deal is held up or blocked by federal regulators.
What’s important for our purposes is what this means for TNT Sports. Under the Netflix agreement, TNT Sports was destined to be spun out with Discovery Global, likely to get caught up in further M&A down the line. Now, under Paramount ownership, TNT Sports’ destiny is a combination with CBS Sports.
Such a tie-up will create a formidable portfolio of live sports rights, including the NFL, College Football Playoff games, the entirety of March Madness, MLB and NHL playoffs, multiple golf majors, including the Masters, UFC, NASCAR, the French Open, and more.
It’s fair to say that this live sports portfolio would be rivaled only by ESPN.
And realistically, the TNT Sports properties might fare better under CBS Sports than to be cast away into a spinoff company filled with other declining assets. CBS has the deep pockets of the Ellison family, who have already proven willing to spend big on sports, having shelled out over $1 billion per year for UFC. Not to mention, CBS can better capitalize on the College Football Playoff, postseason MLB and NHL games, and NASCAR races by putting them on broadcast television rather than cable.
To be sure, not all of these properties will move from TNT Sports straight onto CBS. The company will want to protect the still-lucrative TNT/TBS/truTV carriage fees. Not to mention, WBD’s current distribution deals likely stipulate which programming airs on which channels. But there are some moves that would make sense for CBS to better maximize viewership.
There’s also a likelihood that TNT Sports properties become available on Paramount+, boosting the value of that streaming service.
The bottom line for sports fans is that the TNT Sports brand will, in all likelihood, be rolled into CBS Sports. That calls into question the future of TNT’s studio shows, particularly Inside the NBA, which is licensed to ESPN but remains a TNT production. It also calls into question whether TNT’s production style will be ported over to CBS, or whether properties like MLB and NHL will be produced by teams currently under the CBS Sports umbrella if/when a deal is approved.
Next up is the regulatory process. Given the confidence the Ellison family has shown in its relationship with the Trump administration, and the billions of dollars in fees it would owe WBD if the deal doesn’t close, it seems like approval is a foregone conclusion. But for now, we’ll have to wait and see.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.