HBO Max was renamed Max, and Warner Bros. Discovery lost subscribers::Warner Bros. Discovery lost 1.8 million subscribers in the second quarter of 2023 following HBO Max’s rebrand to Max. The company now has 95.8 million subscribers across all of its services.
In all seriousness, why the hell would a company already branded the “Home Box Office” run away from the moniker in the era of at-home online movie binging. You have some of the most intuitive psychic real estate shy of Twitter, a company whose name will never be changed because the brand recognition is so high. Who could have possibly gotten you to believe changing it to something as vague and ill-suited as Max was a good idea?
agree. These people are so up their own ass they can’t see.
The issue is HBO was also considered a premium brand. And the new Max-sans-HBO-moniker was intended to be a cheap streaming service that combined the garbage of the modern Discovery network with the popular part of WB’s output.
Still calling it HBO Max would have tainted the brand and they’d have been unable to use it in future for premium services.
Which also tells you what they think of customers, that they’d intentionally swap out a high quality streaming service whose selling point was “Premium quality” for a cheap replacement packed with reality shows. They were expecting people to unsubscribe? No kidding.
Is there an HBO left that isn’t Max? It isn’t as though I can stream the Good HBO sans the Bad reality tv crap.
I get HBO through AT&T as a perk. I don’t subscribe to it independently. Its possible that someone at HBO noticed the bulk of their user base has some kind of arrangement like this and thinks just drawing down revenue from these default subscriptions is preferable to chasing new user sign-ups through attractive content and salesmanship.
I think it’s limited to a cable channel now. I don’t believe a streaming HBO service, beyond some (most?) programs being available on Max, is available.
Part of me wonders if that also means DiscoveryWB is planning to sell it at some point, as it doesn’t really fit with what the new company does.
Until those companies realize that it provides no value, and drop the added expense because they know their customers won’t care.
I sign into “max” now and get bombarded on the home screen with basic cable reality show trash, and every time that happens it just makes me want to use it less. The only thing keeping me coming back is the occasional Soderbergh project and an as-of-yet still decent catalogue of movies, though even that has dropped off noticeably.
I would drop my subscription if it wasn’t bundled into my phone plan.
Where did the HBO content go, did they spin off a separate service just for that?
Some of it is there but they’re taking the best of it and leasing it out to others streaming services with ads.
Not to mention all the happy nostalgia from their PRIMARY TARGET CUSTOMERS who were kids in the 80s and still fondly remember the HBO feature presentation intro.
Just reading that got the tune in my head
Some moron just rebranded a logo worth who knows how many possible billions to… just X
Some people are just fucking dumb as hell
He renamed a valuable trademark to a letter that he’ll never be able to trademark. It’s like when Intel tried to trademark the letter I.
Right?! My first thought was “Max? You mean like Cinemax? Did Cinemax buy HBO??” Well, turns out, the OPPOSITE is true. In what world is Cinemax the more valuable brand than HBO???
What’s the most baffling to me is that WB owned HBO and Cinemax when they created HBOMax, but they chose not to include Cinemax content.
I guess these days among the executive class, it’s just really cool to purposefully mismanage your IP.
It’s because they didn’t buy Cinemax to combine them into a bigger more valuable brand with more IP. They bought out Cinemax to eliminate the competition. And they did it around the same time that all the streaming services started taking off, so they obviously got their asses kicked by Netflix. Cable TV as a whole has really suffered since Netflix and Prime got really big.
I hear Coca-Cola is going to rebrand itself to New Coke this year. Can’t fail!!
It would be more like if Coca Cola randomly decided to rebrand itself as Piss.
Because they want to bog it down with shitty titles (quantity vs quality) to appear more competitive with more programming and don’t want to degrade the HBO brand.
What brand is left after you’ve renamed the flagship service?
Its not like HBO Premium is some extra tier of service.
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They freaking cancelled Westworld when it only had one season left in the story.
Sorry to repost. I immediately tossed in a thing about the rebrand and then saw this, so I’m hitting it again because it frames the rebrand as knowing and deliberate (as opposed to a fuck up).
Bad Faith podcast had an episode on the strike a couple weeks back. The guests (strikers) talked about how Zaslav renaming HBO to Max is right inline with their intent to churn out “good enough” content to increase profits rather than increase quality. They likened it to a signal to Wall Street to improve their share value.
I fell out of Bad Faith after the Other Host had a run in with Chris Hansen. Might have to give it another shot.
It comes across as if it was a business decision without regard for their customers…without the basic understanding that their customers ARE their business.
I didn’t know that’s what I meant
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Its a classic for a reason.