What to Expect from HBO Max and Discovery Merge, ‘Max’
By Movieguide® Contributor
New streaming service ‘Max’ is expected to release in the upcoming months, combining HBO Max with Discovery.
When Warner Bros and Discovery merged last April to form Warner Bros Discovery, a critical selling point to shareholders and investors was the potential for a top streaming service that could rival Netflix and Disney+. David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros Discovery, will soon find out if the merger that he spearheaded, which left the company with $50 billion in debt, was worth it.
Max will combine classic HBO series like THE SOPRANOS and SUCCESSION with popular Discovery series like DR. PIMPLE POPPER and FIXER UPPER, providing users with a large content library of both scripted and unscripted shows.
The streaming service is expected to debut at $16 a month, the current price of HBO Max. The streaming service will include several price tiers, including a less expensive option that includes ads.
Warner Bros Discovery has had a rough first year, indefinitely delaying projects and laying off thousands of employees. Although the headline projects of HBO Max –THE HOUSE OF DRAGON, THE WHITE LOTUS, THE LAST OF US, and SUCCESSION— have found vast success, the amount of time spent on the app is eclipsed by larger streaming sites.
In February, HBO Max received 1.3 percent of total minutes spent by Americans watching television, which is dwarfed in comparison to YouTube (7.9 percent), Netflix (7.3 percent), Hulu (3.3 percent), and Amazon Prime (3 percent). The streaming service’s 96 million subscriber count also seems meager when compared to Netflix’s 231 million and Disney Plus’s 235 million. However, the future of the company isn’t as grim as it may seem.
Since Netflix announced a surprising decline in subscriber count during the first quarter of last year, streaming services have shifted focus from increasing subscriber count to improving profitability as investors speculated that streaming services were hitting a ceiling on subscriber counts. Warner Bros Discovery is projecting that Max will break even on profits as early as next year and may even be profitable by 2025. The company already cut its streaming losses to $217 million, a significant improvement from just a few months prior.
It will be interesting to see if Warner Bros Discovery will strike gold with Max or if the failure of the streaming service will signal the death of the company.
Movieguide® previously reported on the streaming landscape:
As streaming service changes and rumored layoffs loom, Warner Bros. Discovery faces a critical week ahead of their Q2 earnings report on Thursday.
Deadline reports that “CEO David Zaslav and his team are expected to lay out more concrete plans for the combined entity than they did on the Q1 earnings call, held just a couple of weeks after the $43 billion Discovery-WarnerMedia merger had been completed.”
The report could also include details regarding the future of the two companies’ streaming services, Discovery+ and HBO Max, such as how they might be combined and under what name.
The future of HBO Max has been precarious. While they paused new live-action kids and family programming as well as unscripted content, they are preparing to launch HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, a GAME OF THRONES prequel.
Additionally, high-level discussions have centered around a “unifying moniker” that would “combine the coastal/metropolitan appeal of HBO Max and the Middle America pull of Discovery+.”
- Content: +1Share:
- Content: +1