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No matter who acquires Warner Bros. Discovery, whether it’s ultimately Netflix or Paramount Skydance, the deal will be one of the largest media mergers in history.
Yet antitrust authorities reviewing these transactions face an unusual obstacle: they cannot reliably calculate market shares for the streaming services at the heart of the proposed deals. The standard tools used to define relevant markets and measure concentration—such as subscriber counts and revenue figures—produce unreliable results in the streaming industry, exposing fundamental limitations in traditional merger analysis. This matters because, under the Clayton Act, merger review must rely heavily on these metrics to predict competitive harm.
Netflix announced earlier this year that it would cease reporting quarterly subscriber numbers, instead directing investors to focus on revenue and operating margin. Disney followed soon thereafter, ceasing to break out subscriber counts for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ separately. These shifts eliminate the kinds of data that the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would typically use to calculate market concentration for horizontal mergers under the agencies’ merger guidelines.