Paramount Skydance acquires Warner Bros. Discovery

Paramount Skydance Corp.’s roughly $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery was not only the most consequential media deal of the quarter. It was also far and away the biggest — not to mention the one that’s still generating tons of headlines and overall chatter.

Announced at the end of February, with an anticipated closing sometime in the third quarter, the all-cash deal values the entertainment studio and library that includes Harry Potter, The Lord of The Rings, and Game of Thrones at around $81 billion. Paramount emerged as the winner following a bidding war that included an offer from Netflix (though the streamer ultimately decided to walk away), and presuming that it gets the deal over the finish line Paramount will end up owning a combined entity that spans Paramount+, HBO Max, Warner Bros., and CNN.

In other words: The combined “Warnermount” as some have taken to calling the newly merged company could end up amounting to a considerable threat in terms of scale. The new company would have more than 200 million subscribers, compared to Netflix’s more than 325 million as of the end of 2025.

Investors acquire TikTok’s U.S. business

Also during the first quarter, meanwhile, a U.S.-led consortium including Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi’s state-backed investment group MGX closed a $14 billion acquisition of TikTok’s U.S. operations (back in January). This deal effectively carved most of the business out of TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, though ByteDance still retains a stake of around 20% ownership.

The TikTok app, of course, enjoys outsized influence in the digital sphere, shaping what hundreds of millions of users watch and talk about each day. The ownership deal put to rest months of regulatory uncertainty that had included the possibility of an outright U.S. ban, by (to satisfy the Trump administration) shifting oversight to domestic ownership — though still preserving a limited algorithmic connection to TikTok’s Chinese parent.

To that last point: TikTok’s core recommendation system, the algorithmic “decider” that chooses content for each user’s For You page, isn’t fully severed from ByteDance. If anything, that compromise reflects the difficulty of trying to isolate a global tech platform from geopolitics.

Investors take Clear Channel Outdoor private

The quarter’s deal-making activity also included a bit of traditional media. Next up: A major player in the billboard arena.

An investor group led by Mubadala Capital and TWG Global struck a $6.2 billion deal to take Clear Channel Outdoor private — an all-cash transaction that’s expected to close in the third quarter. About $3 billion in new equity will go toward paying down debt and funding expansion.

Here’s what’s interesting about this deal, despite involving one of the most old-school sectors of marketing:

While Clear Channel has long been synonymous with things like billboards and transit ads, this deal is essentially a bet that billboards are actually more valuable than people think. Not just as a static outdoor sign, but also as potentially a programmable, data-driven ad platform. In other words, the real opportunity behind this deal seems to be a belief that Clear Channel’s outdoor business could be turned into an AI and programming ad machine. One that makes buying a billboard ad or message feel more like buying an ad on, say, Google.

Telegraph Media Group sold

And then there’s one of Britain’s most storied newspaper groups, which is getting a new owner.

Axel Springer’s £575 million deal (equal to $766 million) for Telegraph Media Group marked the culmination of a somewhat turbulent process that saw an earlier Abu Dhabi-backed bid for the company collapse over rules on foreign state ownership. Once the deal closes by the end of the current second quarter, Axel Springer, which also owns news brands like Politico and Business Insider, will add a legacy brand with global recognition to its portfolio.

The plan reportedly calls for, among other things, using Axel Springer’s digital infrastructure to grow the Telegraph’s reach in the U.S.

ChatGPT owner buys TBPN

OpenAI, meanwhile, isn’t just building AI models anymore — its holdings now include a media business.

The Sam Altman-led creator of ChatGPT acquired The Best Podcasts Network (TBPN), reportedly for a price tag in the low hundreds of millions. TBPN’s flagship daily tech show draws around 70,000 viewers per episode and generates around $30 million in annual revenue, all powered by a team of about a dozen people. OpenAI will fold TBPN into its strategy division to shore up its internal communications and marketing, while still promising the show editorial independence.

Of note, the deal has struck some analysts as puzzling. Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, for example, called it “simply a deal that makes no sense … What exactly is OpenAI getting by owning TBPN that it wasn’t getting before?”, while Neil Cybart framed it as a bid for “mindshare from Big Tech,” arguing that there’s “no reason for OpenAI to buy a tech podcast” beyond reimagining its marketing for younger developers.

Nexstar-Tegna announce a merger

Finally, the Nexstar–Tegna merger that was announced in March has turned into something of a legal and political showdown.

The transaction technically closed on March 19, but it was challenged almost immediately by a group of state attorneys general as well as DirecTV, with opponents arguing the deal concentrates too much local TV power. U.S. District Judge Troy Nunley issued a temporary restraining order at the end of March, citing a “likelihood of success” on antitrust grounds, and has since followed that up with a preliminary injunction. For now, that ruling stops the companies from formally merging. Tegna has to keep operating as a separate company, leaving the deal in a kind of limbo state.

Nexstar could face huge financial disruption down the road if it loses at trial, while there remain questions about how much more local broadcasting will be able to consolidate as a way of dealing with declining local TV.