A deal has been announced which will combine the Olympic rights-holding entity Discovery with WarnerMedia, AT&T’s content unit.

The deal comes some five years after the former US telephone monopoly took a giant step into content by agreeing to take over Time Warner for $85.4 billion (£60.5 billion/€70 billion).

The agreement sees Discovery merge with a catalogue spanning CNN, the HBO network and the Warner Bros film and television studios, with AT&T reported to be taking 71 per cent of the new entity.

The merged business is set to be led by David Zaslav, the Discovery chief executive.

The 2015 deal with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) saw Discovery Communications, the parent of Eurosport, the pan-European television sports network, agree to broadcast the Olympic Games across Europe for two Olympic cycles starting in 2018.

The arrangement was said to apply to every European territory, except for Russia, accounting for 53 countries in total.

The only other exceptions were France - now set to host the 2024 Olympics and Paralympics - and Britain for the 2018 and 2020 Games, since those rights had already been sold.

It was said at the time that Discovery, which had bought Eurosport a year previously, would sub-licence a portion of the rights in "many markets across Europe".

The €1.3 billion (£1.1 billion/$1.6 billion) deal marked a change with the IOC’s previous system of working with a consortium of public broadcasters throughout the continent.

Word of the new deal comes amid frenetic corporate activity in the entertainment sector as media giants scramble for advantageous positions in the fast-developing streaming market.

It comes some three months after Discovery and Snap announced a new content and advertising partnership for Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022.

The two partners first agreed to join forces in 2017, in a deal covering the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics.

The move was viewed as a way of bringing the Games to a younger audience.