Last year, Discovery bought WarnerMedia in a multi-billion dollar deal. Discovery has its Discovery+ streaming service, home to shows like Property Brothers and House Hunters. WarnerMedia has its HBO Max streaming service, home to shows like Game of Thrones and Succession. It was only a matter of time before the new management, headed up by executive David Zaslav, was going to cross the two. And that time is now.
Or at least, we’re now finding out what Zaslav and company have planned. Today was the second quarter earnings call for Warner Bros. Discovery, and they revealed that the services would indeed be combining into one and rolling out sometime in the summer of 2023.
“Our primary focus for the rollout will be in the markets where HBO Max has already launched,” said executive JB Perrette, per Deadline. “We plan to launch the service sequentially starting in the US next summer. Latin America will follow later in the year. European markets with HBO Max will follow in early ‘24 with additional launches and key Asia Pacific territories and some new European markets coming later in 2024.”
Discovery+, HBO Max, or Discovery Max?
There’s still a lot we don’t know about this, including exactly how the new streaming service will be set up. Will all the Discovery+ stuff migrate over to HBO Max, will it be vice versa, or will there be an entirely new service? Discovery Max, perhaps?
If I were in charge of the company, I would go with option number one, since HBO Max has a bigger footprint and is better known. But who knows? Zaslav is coming over from Discovery, so maybe he wants to keep the focus on his baby. The presentation seemed to treat the two services as equal, including with this whopper of a compare-and-contrast chart:
Thoughts? Comments?
Anyway, we’ll watch and see how this develops. There were rumors before this call that the company might be cutting tons of jobs from HBO Max, but nothing like that has materialized…yet. They’ve mentioned cutting back on HBO Max original movies and series for kids, but most other programming seems to be left alone.
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