The New York Budgets

Tag: Warner Bros Discovery

  • It seems the streaming service Max, which was previously known as HBO Max, will be going back to the name HBO Max. It’s a bit confusing, right?

    It seems the streaming service Max, which was previously known as HBO Max, will be going back to the name HBO Max. It’s a bit confusing, right?

    HBO, a trailblazer of the cable era, has been on a very bumpy ride finding an identity in the streaming era. (Warner Bros. Discovery)
    HBO, a trailblazer of the cable era, has been on a very bumpy ride finding an identity in the streaming era. (Warner Bros. Discovery)

    It’s not Max. It’s HBO Max — again.

    In a surprise pivot, Warner Bros. Discovery executives announced Wednesday morning that the streaming service Max would be renamed HBO Max, reinstating the app’s old name and abandoning a contentious change that the company introduced two years ago.

    The reason for the change, executives explained, is straightforward.

    People who subscribe and pay $17 a month for the streaming service wind up watching HBO content like “The White Lotus” and “The Last of Us,” as well as new movies, documentaries and not a whole lot more.

    “It really is a reaction to being in the marketplace for two years, evaluating what’s working and really leaning into that,” Casey Bloys, the chairman of HBO content, said in an interview.

    HBO, a trailblazer of the cable era, has been on a very bumpy ride to finding an identity in the streaming era. There was HBO Go (2008), HBO Now (2015), HBO Max (2020), Max (2023) and now, once again, HBO Max (2025).

    Two years ago, Warner Bros. Discovery executives said that they meant well by changing the name to Max. Their overwhelming concern, the executives said, was that Discovery’s suite of reality shows — “Sister Wives,” “My Feet Are Killing Me” — risked watering down the HBO brand, which continued to produce award-winning series like “Succession.”

    Further, they said, HBO spent decades branding itself as a premium adult service. That was not exactly an ideal anchor for a streaming service that they envisioned would compete head to head with a general entertainment app like Netflix.

    Instead, the name change to Max mostly seemed to cause widespread confusion, both within the entertainment industry and generally among consumers. Was HBO dead? Was it being marginalized? What gives?

    In the last few years in the so-called streaming wars, Netflix has taken a runaway lead over old-guard entertainment brands, drawing roughly 8 percent of all television time in March, according to Nielsen. Warner Bros. Discovery drew 1.5 percent, a little more than Peacock but below Disney’s streaming services, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount, Roku and Tubi, Nielsen said.

    Executives have conceded in recent months that competing with an everything-for-everybody app like Netflix, which has more than 300 million subscribers, was not realistic. Instead, they would be perfectly happy to be a complementary service.

    “We started listening to consumers saying, ‘Hey, we don’t really want more content, we want something that is different, we want to end the death scroll with something that is better,’” JB Perrette, the president of streaming for Warner Bros. Discovery, said in an interview.

    Warner Bros. Discovery executives also discovered over the last two years that much of Discovery’s content was not being watched. Original programs tended to do the best on the service, as did new Warner Bros. movies, licensed A24 films and documentaries. Some Discovery content, particularly from its ID cable network, did well, but everything else — food, lifestyle and other reality series from Discovery — went relatively untouched. (Discovery+ remains available as a stand-alone streaming option.)

    Max has seen encouraging results in recent months. The streaming division at Warner Bros. Discovery is now profitable, and its subscriber count jumped another five million in the first three months of the year, bringing its total number of subscribers to over 122 million. The app recently rolled out to Australia and France, and next year it will be introduced to Britain, Germany and Italy.

    There have also been hints of a bigger change. Just a few weeks ago, Max changed its color scheme back to the old-school HBO’s black and white, leaving behind the blue palette that the company introduced in 2023 with the brand pivot.

    Mr. Bloys said that the transition to streaming has been tricky for many cable companies. HBO “and a bunch of other companies are trying to navigate that,” he said.

    “That said,” he continued, “I do hope this is the last time we have a conversation about the naming of the service.”

  • CNN is launching a new streaming service in the fall of this year

    CNN is launching a new streaming service in the fall of this year

    CNN is getting ready to launch a streaming service. Again.

    Three years after CNN’s parent company killed the hotly anticipated (and very expensive) CNN+ service shortly after it was released, the news network will introduce a new streaming product this fall that packages live and on-demand programming.

    Mark Thompson, the company’s chief executive, told employees about the service in a meeting on Tuesday afternoon. Some of the details about the service remain unclear, including pricing and an exact release date. But Mr. Thompson said the new service would be tied to the company’s recently introduced subscription product, which gives paying members unlimited access to articles posted on CNN.com.

    CNN is also taking pains to avoid alienating its most valuable customers: traditional cable distributors. Those customers will have free access to CNN’s streaming service.

    Alex MacCallum, CNN’s executive vice president of digital products and services, said in a statement that bundling the video service with CNN’s existing digital subscription product would allow “audiences to get the most out of CNN in one seamless and simple way.”

    Like most other news organizations, CNN is trying to find new sources of revenue as its traditional business declines. Mr. Thompson said in an interview this year that the company’s “future prospects will not be good,” if CNN does not follow its audiences to new platforms “with real conviction and scale.”

    Mr. Thompson, who previously led a digital turnaround at The New York Times, has focused his attention on CNN’s digital business since he joined the company in 2023. Investments in the digital efforts are fueled, in part, by a $70 million investment from Warner Bros. Discovery, its parent company.

    Mr. Thompson hired Ms. MacCallum, a former executive at The Times, to lead the network’s digital push, and is planning to add 200 digital-focused employees this year. The network laid off roughly 200 employees focused on its traditional TV operations this year.

    CNN’s new service won’t look like CNN+, its failed $300 million splashy foray into streaming that was stuffed with well-known news and entertainment personalities. The new service will be more stripped down, resembling the network’s traditional cable experience, although not an exact replica. Subscribers will also have access to a library of original shows and documentaries.