Zaslav’s streaming lieutenant JB Perrette stays to run the business side of Ellison’s Skydance

Executives at an acquired company usually head for the exits. JB Perrette, one of David Zaslav’s closest lieutenants at Warner Bros. Discovery, is doing the opposite: he is staying on in David Ellison’s Skydance with a wider remit than before, as the business-side counterpart to the merged company’s two biggest content bosses.

As Deadline’s Dade Hayes reports, most of the reaction to Skydance’s new leadership team focused on content executives such as Casey Bloys, Channing Dungey and George Cheeks. But Perrette will be Co-Chair and Chief Business Officer of both Skydance DTC and Skydance TV, sitting beside Bloys, co-chair and chief content officer of the streaming unit, and Cheeks, who holds the same content title at the television group. He will have direct global oversight of distribution, advertising sales, content sales, DTC strategy, marketing and business operations.

His résumé explains much of the choice. At WBD he ran global streaming and gaming, leading the rollout of HBO Max across more than 130 markets, including the UK, Germany and Italy after a longtime output deal with Sky ended, and the streaming business turned profitable on his watch. The weaker line is the 2023 rebrand of HBO Max as Max, which he presided over with Zaslav before the service went back to its original name. Before that, at Discovery, he helped launch Discovery+ and Eurosport’s streaming service. During an 11-year run at NBCUniversal, where he overlapped with Zaslav, he rose to president of digital and affiliate distribution and was one of the key executives behind the launch of Hulu as a joint venture with Fox in 2007.

Company insiders describe several weeks of conversations in which Perrette gained the confidence of Ellison and his co-CEO, Ynon Kreiz. “He is often the one asking the best questions in the room and has the most comprehensive view,” one former colleague told Deadline. The payday helps: a March SEC filing put his deal-related proceeds at $142 million, which one source cited as a possible motivation. “He certainly didn’t need the money,” the person said. “He obviously felt compelled by the opportunity.”

The job ahead is plumbing. Skydance investor Gerry Cardinale said last week that merging the back ends of Paramount+, Pluto and BET+ had already paid off, and would be repeated “when we bring the HBO universe into this.” A rival streaming executive said that work could save hundreds of millions of dollars as Skydance chases at least $6 billion in cost savings: “JB is good casting for that kind of thing because he’s willing to get into the weeds on it.” Advertising is the open question; one insider said his title caused “a lot of confusion” because he does not have a deep background there, and the ad-sales hierarchy below him has not been set.

Another source put that gap in starker terms. “What we took for granted all those years at the upfronts is up for grabs,” the person said. “Ellison is trying to turn it into a tech company.”

Tags: hbo max, David Ellison, Warner Bros. Discovery, executive-move, Skydance, David Zaslav