Tony Schiavone has addressed the merger between Discovery and WarnerMedia and says he hopes it can lead to good rather than bad for AEW.
WarnerMedia – which owns TBS and TNT – is set to merge with Discovery and WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar is already a casualty with warnings of more cuts to come to the new media conglomerate. The New York Post has reported that new CEO David Zaslav is expected to “take a scalpel” to the new company which will be known as Warner Bros. Discovery.
Billionaire media mogul John Malone, who is a longtime stakeholder in Discovery previously commented that “cost synergies” – read “cuts” – for the newly merged company should be expected to “easily go past” $3 billion to $4 billion a year.
Speaking on his What Happened When podcast, Tony Schiavone admits the merger makes him nervous because of what he went through while working for WCW when TimeWarner merged with AOL which ultimately led to Vince McMahon buying his competition, but says others within AEW are calm:
“From the people I’ve talked with, no. For me on the surface, yes, because I know what happened before [with WCW]. But I think we have a viable enough product that if Discovery says, ‘We don’t want wrestling,’ we could end up somewhere else.”
“The Khans are pretty plugged in. That’s what’s different about this era is that if Time Warner/Discovery doesn’t want us, we still have a business. I think there’s always some concern, but we’ve built up a very good relationship with WarnerMedia.”
Schiavone added that he sees the merger as a possible gateway to AEW having its own streaming service in the future:
“If this merger comes, and as we’ve been reading, they’ve been clearing out a lot of people, it seems to me they are really big into streaming services. What I hope this means is that we are finally going to have a streaming service. In other words, we are finally going to have our own network where we can show our old shows.”