Warner Bros. Discovery confirms the renaming of HBO Max to Max

Warner Bros. Discovery has confirmed its long-awaited plan to drop “HBO” from HBO Max, announcing that its new streaming service will be called Max.

The new offering, which combines programming from HBO Max and Discovery, is expected to be available in the coming weeks. The company made the announcement during a Phase 14 press event at its Burbank property.

“From greatest superheroes to true champions; from culture-defining drama to taste-defining entertainment; From fantastical realms to the most realistic worlds, Max offers unparalleled choice,” said JB Perrette, President and CEO, Global Streaming & Games, Warner Bros. Discovery said. “This new brand marks a significant shift from two smaller products, HBO Max and Discovery+, to our broader content offering and consumer offering. While each product offered something for some people, Max has a wide range of quality options for everyone.”

After months of signaling that two streaming products would be combined into one, WBD backtracked earlier this year and said it would continue to offer Discovery+ as a standalone streamer. This decision came after research showed that some die-hard fans of the unscripted plan on Discovery+ refused to shell out significantly more for an upgraded plan.

Wednesday’s streaming event came just over a year after WarnerMedia and Discovery completed its $43 billion merger, a mega-deal with streaming at its heart. HBO Max was launched by WarnerMedia in 2020 after going through several bumps in the road while being 100% owned by AT&T. The telecom giant spun off the entertainment business in the newly merged company, but retained a major stake.

In the AT&T era, the emphasis on “HBO” in “HBO Max” was always a key part of the business strategy to get into the streaming game, especially given the premium network’s existing paid network with tens of millions of subscribers in the US. the time when launch plans were made for HBO Max, game of thrones completed its record-breaking final season and the prevailing thought was that there was no brighter jewel in the corporate crown. Other names were never seriously considered, and executives who oversaw efforts to christen the service said the investigation leans heavily in HBO’s direction. However, its strong connection to the legacy HBO network was an early stumbling block in terms of subscriber growth, as trying to tell linear viewers how to “activate” a streaming account was impractical. The official May 2020 launch of HBO Max, the latest of Netflix’s four major new competitors to launch within seven months, has also been completely besieged by Covid.

While WBD CEO David Zaslav is as enamored with HBO as he is with the AT&T regime in general, his management team concluded that the “HBO” in the name positioned the mainstream entertainment service as a little too rarefied to compete with competitors like Disney+. can compete or Netflix.match. The combined service is not only home to the coastal solution successor but also definitely unwritten Central American series Bald and scared And 90 day fiance.