What does Paramount Skydance acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery mean for sports — and can the NHL and PWHL use the Olympics as a springboard
Sports Media with Richard Deitsch
Audacy
4.5 • 757 Ratings
🗓️ 28 February 2026
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Episode 596 of the Sports Media Podcast with Richard Deitsch features Austin Karp, the lead media writer for Sports Business Journal. In this podcast, we discuss Paramount Skydance acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery and what that means for sports; the deal bringing CBS Sports and Turner Sports under one roof; what it means for certain sports such as the NFL; what the gold medal games mean for the NHL and the PWHL; the NHL thinking if it had a better slot for the men's U.S.–Canada gold medal it would have hit 35 million; the Athletic hiring several former Washington Post journalists to expand its coverage; Unrivaled’s viewership dropping off; NBC planning a revamp of its NFL pregame show; and more. You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and more.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the sports media podcast. |
| 0:09.6 | I'm your host, Richard Dyche. |
| 0:10.3 | My producer is Patrick Antonetti. |
| 0:12.6 | One guest on this episode, it is a regular, and there's a lot to discuss in the sports media world. |
| 0:17.5 | Austin Karp is the lead media writer for Sports Business Journal. |
| 0:22.2 | Welcome, Austin. |
| 0:23.6 | Howdy, Richard? |
| 0:25.0 | All right. |
| 0:25.4 | So we got to start here because it's writing on the news. |
| 0:29.2 | The big news, at least in terms of the larger, broader media landscape, is that Paramount Skydance is now poised to acquire Warner Brothers discovery after Netflix |
| 0:41.2 | said we're out of this bidding war. |
| 0:45.6 | So that would mean, at least in terms of a sports context, a massive, massive amount of properties. For the larger stuff, obviously, Warner Brothers |
| 0:57.6 | has HBO. Paramount has this legacy studio. So, you know, you're combining all sorts of |
| 1:06.9 | massive entities. And the interesting thing, and we'll get to this with Austin and myself, |
| 1:11.8 | you know, WBD has no plans to be spun off anymore, the cable channels into a separate |
| 1:20.8 | company, which would have been Discovery Global if Netflix had won out, because Netflix didn't |
| 1:25.4 | want that part. So for the purposes for us, what all of this |
| 1:29.8 | would mean if it gets through the regulators is that CBS Sports and Turner Sports are under one |
| 1:37.5 | roof. Jake Klein, who follows both Austin and myself, I believe he's a lawyer who's really in a sports |
| 1:44.5 | media, sent a very helpful note about what all these properties would be. |
| 1:50.5 | And so hopefully this is all correct. |
| 1:51.9 | NFL, MLB, NHL, college football, including the CFP Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, MWC, Mountain West. |
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