HBO Max to rebrand as Max this May
David Farnor | On 13, Apr 2023
HBO Max is rebranding as Max this May, as Warner Bros Discovery continues its efforts to consolidate its digital presence.
While HBO has been a key brand in the entertainment landscape for years, Warner-Disco has made the surprise decision to move away from it and double down on the “Max” part of the fledgling streaming service. Max, as it will simply be called, will bring together everything from HBO and HBO Max and Warner Bros with brands such as HGTV, Food Network, Discovery Channel, TLC, ID and more.
That will also include the DC Universe and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, and WBD made no secret in its launch announcement that it would be leaning into its big franchises to line its coffers. that will include a new Max Original Harry Potter series, a Max Original comedy derived from The Big Bang Theory, a Game of Thrones prequel titled A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, a Max Original drama series based on The Conjuring films, Magnolia Network’s Fixer Upper: The Hotel, Discovery Channel’s Survive the Raft, Max Original Peter & the Wolf from Bono, Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty: The Anime, Investigation Discovery’s Lost Women of Highway 20, Cartoon Network’s Tiny Toons Looniversity, and TLC’s Love & Translation.
Also in the line-up are Max Originals The Penguin starring Colin Farrell and HBO Original drama The Sympathizer, a new chapter of True Detective starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, HBO’s The Regime starring Kate Winslet, Max Original six-part docuseries SmartLess: On The Road, following Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes as they take viewers on an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the sold-out live tour of their podcast, and Max Original kids’ series Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai.
“The Max service is a wide-ranging mosaic of content that will be unmatched in the breadth, reach, and excellence of its offerings,” said Casey Bloys, Chairman and CEO, HBO and Max Content. “We are unique because we have the best-in-all-categories across the board by any measure – be they ratings, awards, fandom. We know we can satisfy any craving because we have the brands that people love. At Max, they will find what they want, when they want it.”
Max will offer three pricing tiers – an ad-lite package priced $9.99 a month or $99.99/year, an ad-free package priced $15.99/month or $149.99/year, or a 4K ad-free package priced $19.99/month or $199.99/year.
Existing HBO Max subscribers will have access to Max at the same price as their HBO Max subscription, while their profiles, settings, watch history, “Continue Watching,” and “My List” items will also migrate to Max.
The service will go live in the USA on 23rd May. In the UK, the latest we heard was to expect a release date of roughly autumn 2024.
HBO Max to merge with Discovery+ in 2023
5th August 2022
HBO Max will officially be merged with Discovery+ in 2023, Warner Bros Discovery has confirmed, after a week of rumours and speculation about what’s going on behind the WB-Disco doors – and what’s clear, as the dust settles from the company’s quarterly earning call, is that a big upheaval is certainly underway.
WarnerMedia and Discovery’s merger, which dates back to 2021, has always had the two disparate media giants looking to combine its programming. The former comes with a reputation for its prestigious TV output, from Game of Thrones and The Sopranos to The White Lotus and Mare of Easttown, while the latter is a non-fiction, reality, sports and lifestyle hub.
In the second quarter of 2022, WB-Disco’s combined subscriber total was 92.1 million, the company announced, up 1.7 million from the previous quarter, but with a lack of breakdown across subscriber numbers and platforms, it’s hard for the public to measure what’s working and what’s not.
“At the end of the day, putting all the content together was the only way we saw to make this a viable business,” JB Perrette, CEO and president of global streaming and interactive for WB-Disco, said last night. The aim is that age-old goal for a large media company: to offer something for everyone.
That process is already in motion, with Chip and Joanna Gaines’ Magnolia Network programming – including renovation series Fixer Upper – joining the HBO Max library this September, where it will sit alongside The Wire and House of the Dragon. (Discovery+, meanwhile, is introducing a CNN Originals section to include titles that were on the streaming platform CNN+, which launched in April only to be shut down a couple of weeks later.)
But something for everyone, of course, comes with its own challenges and costs. Because while its general aim to launch a single streaming entity in summer 2023 – with an ad-supported and ad-free option – sounds straightforward, the realities of pulling that off and reconciling the differences in demands, interests and requirements is something altogether more complicated. It’s no surprise, for example, that research is being conducted around consumer perception of the HBO Max brand.
Complicating the matter further is the shift in commercial and creative strategy going on behind the scenes, with the cost element of the equation undoubtedly something that WB-Disco is now focused on. This is thanks to new CEO David Zaslav, who is pushing to reverse last year’s strategy of releasing films simultaneously in cinemas and on HBO Max and also apparently working to try and rebuild relationships with filmmakers. That, however, has led the company in the opposite direction with two shocking cancellations of entire projects: Batgirl and Scoob!: Holiday Heist, both of which are almost completed and neither of which are now set to be released at all in any format.
“This idea of expensive films going direct to streaming — we can’t find an economic case for it,” Zaslav said. The two movies therefore seem to have been axed, possibly for tax reasons, leaving the creative teams behind them without any tangible or digital work to show for their efforts.
The message was firmly on the idea of quality and scale, with Zaslav highlighting other DC superhero films – such as Black Adam, Shazam! 2 and even, surprisingly and controversially, The Flash – as upcoming titles. He cited Marvel’s approach to crafting a 10-year plan for DC movies, although gave no further details.
The hope, then, is that these two are blips, with HBO and HBO Max content chief Casey Bloys still in place. However, with a number of Warner Bros movies dropping off HBO Max in recent weeks – including Moonshot, Superintelligence, The Witches, An American Pickle, Locked Down and Charm City Kings – and HBO originals such as Vinyl, Mrs Fletcher and Run having also left the platform, people’s concerns haven’t been allayed about what cost-cutting measures WB-Disco might be taking, or might take in the future.
What does all this mean for the UK? WB-Disco has said that it aims to launch its merged HBO-Discovery platform in Europe in early 2024, with additional markets in autumn 2024, which means things are still broadly on schedule with the 2025 window mooted previously, due to HBO’s existing exclusivity deal with Sky.
In the meantime, WB-Disco has commissioned almost 150 hours of lifestyle shows for Discovery+ in the UK, including The Big Body Clinic and Charlotte Church’s Dream Build.
WarnerMedia and Discovery to merge as streaming battle escalates
23rd May 2021
WarnerMedia and Discovery are looking to merge, combining Warner’s entertainment, sports and news library with Discovery’s non-fiction and international entertainment and sports businesses to create a bigger media player in an increasingly competitive streaming landscape.
The new company will bring together HBO Max with Discovery’s own streaming platform, Discovery+, which launched in the UK last and year and the USA earlier this year. That means almost 200,000 hours of programming, spanning HBO, Warner Bros, Discovery, DC Comics, CNN, Cartoon Network, HGTV, Food Network, the Turner Networks, TNT, TBS, Eurosport, Magnolia, TLC, Animal Planet, ID and more.
The transaction is anticipated to close in mid-2022, subject to approval by Discovery shareholders. Should it all go through, the result will be a sizeable entertainment hub, and the world’s second biggest media group in terms of revenue, behind only Disney, which closed its own merger with 20th Century Fox recently.
The result is also a sense of deja vu, after telecoms firm AT&T, which owns WarnerMedia, HBO and CNN, snapped up those brands in 2018 through its purchase of Time Warner for $100 billion-plus. Going back even further, AOL took over Time Warner for about $160 billion. Warner’s library is one reason for its attractiveness to other companies, and speculation has already arisen that WarnerDiscovery (or whatever they call the merged brands) is being structured ready for a future sale to another player. Indeed, Amazon is currently in the market for an acquisition, with talks reportedly underway for the potential purchase of MGM.
In the meantime, it strengthens HBO Max’s position in the marketplace, as it looks at the idea of expanding beyond the USA – something unlikely to happen in the UK for several years, due to HBO’s existing exclusive deal with Comcast-owned Sky TV. Discovery+ reportedly has about 15 million subscribers, while HBO Max has about 64 million subscribers, but even combined that lags behind Netflix (208 million) and Disney+ (100 million).