HBO Max Was Renamed Max, and Warner Bros. Discovery Lost Subscribers

Warner Bros. Discovery lost 1.8 million subscribers in the three months following the launch of Max. From a report: The losses weren't exclusive to the Max streaming service, though. In its earnings report on Thursday, the company reported having 95.8 million global subscribers across all of its services -- down from 97.6 million at the end of the first quarter of this year. Despite this, the executives at Warner Bros. Discovery don't seem too worried. During an earnings call, the company's chief financial officer, Gunnar Wiedenfels, attributed the downward trend to "overlapping subscriber bases between Max and Discovery Plus" as well as "expected churn" following the end of The Last of Us season 1 and the series finale of Succession.

CEO David Zaslav had something similar to say, noting that "while we have seen some expected subscriber disruption, we have experienced lower than expected churn throughout this process" -- a process that involved asking HBO Max subscribers to download a new Max app to their devices in order to continue using the service. Zaslav also said that the company still expects its streaming business in the US to become profitable this year.

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[Anonymous Coward]

News for nerds? Stuff that matters?

Slashdead: We be 0wn3d buh BIZ-X

Should rename it Home Box Office

[jfdavis668]

But I think everyone forgets that by now.

Re:Should rename it Home Box Office

[cayenne8]

Yeah, my first thought was WTF would they ditch the very popular and VERY well known company name "HBO" for just Max?

Seems like the latest round of marketing folks coming to businesses these days haven't a clue about the job they are trying to do, and how it all works.

Re:Should rename it Home Box Office

[Opportunist]

Hey, trashing brands is the new fad for rich people!

Re:Should rename it Home Box Office

[jacks smirking reven]

Right? Let's take the most prestigious TV brand in history probably, known for dozens of high quality shows (find a top 10 TV show list and HBO shows are probably half of them) and just throw it away.

David Zaslav is scientific proof that money and power absolutely does not equal smarts. Unreal.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

He cancelled many of the shows that made HBO interesting too. At this point there's not a lot on there that I'd be willing to pay for anyway.

Re:

[omnichad]

I think it's because HBO is just one of a dozen or more brands under the umbrella and people didn't get the impression that it had content from all these other units.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, my first thought was WTF would they ditch the very popular and VERY well known company name "HBO" for just Max?

Short answer: Because the company is run by incompetent idiots.

Longer answer: Over the last several years, all the mergers and acquisitions have resulted in this big corporate conglomerate now known as "Warner Bros. Discovery". They now own so many different brands that the ass-clowns running the company have completely lost sight of the fact that some brands/products are much more well known than others.

Re:

[cayenne8]

Short answer: Because the company is run by incompetent idiots.

What's next? Get Dylan Mulvaney to be your new spokesperson?

Seems to be the level of thinking there at "Max".....

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Because HBO has a high cache and MAX was always going to be shittier than HBO Max. If they'd continued to use the HBO name, the end result would have been to trash the HBO brand, not to make their streaming service more popular.

Re:

[xeoron]

But wait there is more.... I closed my HBO MAX account years ago. It only existed for a couple days to enjoy a free trail and some movies that skipped they theatre. I told them to close/delete my account which was linked to a unique email address just for it. When the service was rebranded I got email from them saying I should sign up and join MAX. This means: "They do not delete your data when you ask them to!!!"

Re:

[Can'tNot]

No one deletes all the data connecting a service to you, nor would that make any sense. You signed up for a free trial. If they purged every record of your free trial, what would stop you from just getting freebies over and over again?

Re:

[colekane7745]

Exactly, that's what I thought too. I don't understand why they would do that, it doesn't really make sense. It's not like their reputation is bad or something, so the name change is really unnecessary. Everyone knows what HBO is, but with the new name, I don't think everyone's going to recognise it. I suppose most people will still call it HBO tho.

I don't get it

[alvinrod]

If it weren't for Twitter rebranding as X, I would have to say this was the dumbest such move of the last year, or maybe even decade. It's not as though HBO has some terrible reputation as a slimy company that you might want to hide (e.g. Comcast) in the hopes of pulling the wool over the eyes of consumers. Rather, it's probably quite the opposite and if you asked people to name some of the best television series of all time, HBO will probably occupy at least 2 of those spots for most people and likely 3 for many.

Re:

[skam240]

I would argue that most dont associate HBO (er... Max) and Comcast as being part of the same entity due them being branded separately. Most Max users I know like the network as they have positive associations with the channel due to it's popular shows like Game of Thrones. You're actually the first person I've seen voice distaste for Max or HBO based on their connection to Comcast.

Re:I don't get it

[Zak3056]

I would argue that most dont associate HBO (er... Max) and Comcast as being part of the same entity due them being branded separately.

I'd argue that it has less to do with branding and more to do with them not being the same entity. Comcast is NBC/Universal, HBO is Warner.

Re:

[Junta]

From what I've read, it seemed it was a brand decision to avoid "tarnishing" the HBO brand as they brought random crap onto the streaming service.

Which should have been a red flag, after all, what were they saving the brand value for? If they thought the content was going to ruin reputation, why run it? If you still felt compelled to rebrand, couldn't you have come up with anything vaguely better than 'max'?

Re: I don't get it

[Bodrius]

After the merger, they wanted to have a single streaming uber-app, but they didn't want to dilute the benefits of market segmentation and decades of premium content and brand recognition.

So they moved the separate brands/apps into channels on their new uber-app - except no one wants to download yet another streaming app from a brand with no recognition.

So they force all subscribers on their premium brand to replace their streaming app with the new uber-app - to get a guaranteed starting subscriber base.

Thus

Re:I don't get it

[nightflameauto]

Having followed this a little bit, the execs wanted to drop the HBO name because they thought it was too adult focused. Apparently they forgot all the children's programming that HBO has been known for since all the way back in the eighties. But, at the same time this was happening in one wing of the WB empire, changing the name to something new so it didn't seem "so adult focused," another branch was deciding to drop a lot of the children programming from the streaming side in hopes of syndicating it.

Basically, we're watching WB become big enough that they come across like a stumbling, drunken sailor when viewed from afar. Shoving Discovery and HBO together may have worked well, had they not, at the same time, removed a ton of HBO originals trying to look for quick cash through syndication or licensing them out.

Re:I don't get it

[jacks smirking reven]

And by trying to draw distinctions and not dilute things they effectively ruined every brands reputations. I know the public isn't the smartest but this is a case of a company really thinking the public has no method of distinction at all. If you kept adult HBO and WB content under "HBO" and moved your kids and family stuff to "Discovery" everyone would be fine with that and get it.

Disney already went through this isn the 80s/90's. They didn't want to put more mature content under the Disney banner so that's how we got "Touchstone Pictures". Obviously didn't work out for Disney, a famously forgotten and small brand today.

Re:

[alvinrod]

To me that makes it even funnier. I'm fairly sure they have the trademark to "Max" through their previous acquisition of Cinemax, but back in the day it was often called skin-a-max due to running a lot soft core adult movies at night. HBO certainly had plenty of shoes with nudity, or even graphic sex scenes, but usually those were in service of plot or character development as opposed to the reason you were watching the show.

Nepo babies are in charge of everything

[rsilvergun]

there's not grand plan going on here. Nepotism is rampant. A strong economy and growing up with constant new tech meant we didn't really notice it the same way because the pace of everything was such that mistakes like this weren't as obvious. When some rich man's son drove a brand and company into the ground there was something right there to replace it

We're stagnating, exactly the way they did in the Middle Ages and for the same reasons. Instead of putting people who know what they're doing in charge

Re:

[jbengt]

We're stagnating, exactly the way they did in the Middle Ages and for the same reasons.

Because of the plagues?

Re:

[rsilvergun]

Nope, because of the Kings. The plagues were a big part of what got us out of the dark ages. Killed off a lot of the old guard, and made members of the peasant class that could still work pretty valuable.

Re:I don't get it

[fahrbot-bot]

Perhaps it was re-branded "Max" in preparation for launching an additional new discounted service named "Min" ... :-)

Re:

[omnichad]

Just Mid.

Re:

[mjwx]

Perhaps it was re-branded "Max" in preparation for launching an additional new discounted service named "Min" ... :-)

Or that it'll crash and burn in a spectacularly predictable fashion (which will be a complete shock to management) like the similarly named Boeing product.

Re:

[Anubis IV]

It's not as though HBO has some terrible reputation as a slimy company that you might want to hide

For a vocal part of the US population, HBO still means "Hell's Box Office" because of its willingness to show uncut, rated-R films on television. I interact with a lot of those folks, and my wife and I both observed sideways glances when we'd casually mention that we were subscribed to HBO Max. I think that reputation is decreasing with time because the HBO brand itself is being diluted by the content on its streaming platform, but I was surprised to see that the stigma still lives.

Dick Dastardly Kicking His Snickering Dog

[Pseudonymous Powers]

As with so many things these days, the fact that David Zaslav is so cartoonishly evil makes it easy to be overlook how stupid he is.

Re:

[rsilvergun]

you know for all his stupidity he's still fabulously wealthy and he still hold the lives of thousands in his hands...

These idiots are in charge of our lives.

Re:

[alvinrod]

Not really. If some idiot runs a company into the ground, they're out on their ass, but the rank and file will still be around after someone else buys it. Unless the industry itself is dying out, business will go on. Even if the company dies, new entrants will spring up to fill the void left by some company going under.

Consider the US PC market. Three to four decades ago, there were far more companies selling PCs than there are today. Yet even as many of those companies ceased to exist for a variety of r

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Magary on Zaslav [sfgate.com]

Skini-Max?

[bill_mcgonigle]

'Max was an HBO competitor.

"I know, let's flush our brand recognition!"
-some millennial MBA

Re:

[jacks smirking reven]

Hey let's be fair here, David Zaslav is 63

Re:

[omnichad]

I don't know how I didn't realize that's where the Max came from in HBO Max. The parent company owns Cinemax too.

Re:

[chas.williams]

They subverted your expectations.

Something similar happened with Crunchy and Funim

[williamyf]

When Crunchyroll and Funimation merged, the userbase that had both subscriptions started to count as 1 after the merger, and at some point they probably had to download a revamped/unified app for the merged service

But since hating Warner+Discovery is fashinable and thertefore produces more clicks, here we are...

TL;DR : Nothing to see here, this is normal, has nothing to do with the re-name, move along

Re:

[Hadlock]

The reason to switch apps is a clean legal break to leverage new payment processing discounts due to increased volume

Forgetting who they are

[Tony Isaac]

Lots of companies, as they grow, forget who they are.

HBO - Home Box Office - had a mission, to bring movie-theater movies to cable.
MTV - Music TV - had a mission, to bring music videos to cable.

Eventually, many brands get diluted because they branch out too much. They would be better off sticking to their mission, and launching new channels for a wider variety of content.

Should have called it X

[ruddk]

what could go wrong

Life emulates Monty Python

[glitch!]

There were so many insightful posts about their insanity of changing their name, and I had mod points. Consider all those modded up.

I am reminded of the Monty Python episode where an agent changed the name of "Conquistador Instant Coffee" to "Conquistador Instant Leprosy". It was an "ad campaign" then a joke.

Many of us remember "New Coke".

Some of us may remember when "Dr. Dobb's Journal" tried to change their name to "Software Tools". I sent them a VERY STERN message telling them that they were assholes for

Re:

[mrfaithful]

Many of us remember "New Coke".

New Coke doesn't really belong I don't think. That was a decision made in a "data driven" way. Pepsi was doing well with their "Pepsi Challenge" pop-ups in malls and the like where they kept demonstrating that average people seemed to prefer the taste of Pepsi to Coke. Similarly Diet Coke was a recipe quite different to regular coke and people liked that too. So they made a modification to regular Coke that took the same route as Pepsi and Diet Coke. And in testing people consistently said they liked New Co

Dumbest Roll-out Ever

[hirschma]

Hmm, let's see:

1. Force users to change apps, which was a buggy process,
2. New app has less functionality, crappier UX as the previous one,
3. Lose the HBO branding,
4. Replace it with a logotype that has an "a" that looks like sidewise toilet,
5. Mix non-premium shows in with the premium stuff, thus making it appear that there's less premium stuff,
6. Lose.

What the hell do they pay those consultants for, anyways?