Ever get the feeling the Ellisons aren’t used to being told “no” ? After Warner Bros. Discovery’s board rejected the improved Paramount takeover offer, sticking with Netflix, Paramount got its pen out.
David Ellison’s company filed a letter with a House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee on Wednesday, according to Deadline. Wishing them well? A happy new year, perhaps? Not a chance! Instead, in the letter, Paramount’s chief legal officer, Makan Delrahim, claimed the Netflix deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery was:
“…presumptively unlawful…”
Even more, it:
“…(would) further cement Netflix dominance in streaming video on demand.”
The letter was timed to arrive on the very day the subcommittee held a hearing on the streaming market, where this acquisition was an agenda item.
Paramount clearly aims to try disrupt the deal by drawing attention to the place of Netflix in the same movie production, streaming, and premium entertainment as a movie studio, not some YouTube adjacent content house that has just accidentally grown huge. They will then use this claimed Netflix SVOD market-dominant position to argue that Netflix would then become scaled to be anticompetitive, so the deal should be rejected.
The Netflix deal focuses purely on the studio and streaming assets, whereas Paramount bid for the whole company.
