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.
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.