UPDATED with launch date: Warner Bros Discovery has confirmed its long-expected plan to jettison the “HBO” from HBO Max, announcing that its rebranded streaming service will be called Max.
The new offering, which combines programming from HBO Max and Discovery, will go live May 23. The company made the announcement during a press event at Stage 14 on its Burbank lot.
“This is a real moment for us … This is our time. This is our chance, and everything is possible,” CEO David Zaslav said in his introductory remarks. “I feel like, for our company, this is our rendezvous with destiny.” The $43 billion Warner Media-Discovery merger closed a bit more than a year ago, and 2023 also happens to be the 100th anniversary of the founding of Warner Bros. The centennial provided a centerpiece for an opening video as well as Zaslav’s comments. He called 2022 “a year of coming together, a year of restructuring, and now off we go, all together to build Warner Bros. Discovery into the next century.”
JB Perrette, President & CEO, Global Streaming & Games, Warner Bros Discovery, said the aim of blending Discovery and Warner content in a single service is to stand out “in a sea of streaming services” crowding the market. “In this era of peak confusion, we’re trying to simplify and improve the experience for consumers,” he said.
After signaling for months that two streaming products would combine into one, WBD backtracked earlier this year and said it would continue to provide Discovery+ as a stand-alone streamer. That decision came after research indicated resistance among some diehard fans of the unscripted fare on Discovery+ to have to spend considerably more for an upgraded subscription.
Wednesday’s streaming event took place a little more than a year after the close of the $43 billion merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, a megadeal with streaming at its core. HBO Max launched in 2020, after hitting several bumps in the road, by WarnerMedia when it was fully owned by AT&T. The telco giant spun off the entertainment company into the newly merged entity but retained a large stake.
In the AT&T era, emphasizing the “HBO” in “HBO Max” was always a key part of the corporate strategy for getting into the streaming game, particularly because of the premium network’s existing paid base of tens of millions of subscribers in the U.S. At the time launch plans were made for HBO Max, Game of Thrones was concluding its record-smashing final season and the prevailing thought was that no shinier jewel existed in the corporate crown. No serious consideration was ever given to other names, and executives who oversaw the effort to christen the service said research tilted heavily in the direction of HBO. The strong affiliation with legacy HBO network, however, proved an early stumbling block in terms of subscriber growth as the effort to communicate to linear viewers how to “activate” a streaming account proved unwieldy. The official launch of HBO Max in May 2020, which marked the last of four major new competitors to Netflix launched over a seven-month span, was also completely waylaid by Covid.
While WBD CEO David Zaslav is as enamored of HBO as the AT&T regime overall, his management team concluded that the “HBO” in the name positioned the general entertainment service as slightly too rarified to match rivals like Disney+ or Netflix. The combined service is home not only to the coastal fixation Succession but also decidedly Middle American unscripted series like Naked and Afraid and 90 Day Fiancé.
Jill Goldsmith contributed to this report.
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