"Put down new subscribers": Warner removes the HBO name from its new platform, according to Bloomberg

The merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, becoming Warner Bros. Discovery, It does not stop kicking with rumors of decisions that shake the future of the still very young HBO Max platform. In the middle of last year, the merger of HBO Max and Discovery + into a single service was announced. CEO David Zaslav apparently thought twice about a month ago when he decided the merger was a thing of the past, as he didn’t want to alienate Discovery+ subscribers by giving them a service they didn’t want: 24 million people in all. the world who pay half of what HBO Max costs.

All the company’s definitive future plans will be revealed in a presentation that Warner prepares for April 12, forward Bloomberg. According to the outlet, the three platforms that are expected to be announced are:

• The version with HBO Max ads, which will cost $10 in the United States.
• The version without ads called simply Max, for 15 or 16 dollars (that is, this and the previous one without price increases
• A new $20 platform, with better video quality and other features that have not been revealed.

This is a new movement related to the purification of expenses and that has led the company to make openly unpopular decisions, such as the cancellation of films that are practically finished such as ‘Batgirl’ (some of them subsequently leaked), or the elimination of series of the service, among them very iconic titles, for reasons related to saving in the payment of taxes. If Warner is thinking so much about how its streaming offer will end up being defined, it is because it does not want to lose one of the almost one hundred million paying subscribers that its services have, the majority coming from HBO Max.

off HBO

More curious is the decision to dispense with the HBO part in the name of the payment platform. According to Bloomberg, the reason, in Zaslav’s words, is that “the name HBO gives new subscribers a downturn.” The new name indicates that this is more than just HBO Max with content from Discovery (whose content will be added to the service in the coming months), and that it will be more of a renewed platform. Everything indicates that simply ‘Max’ is a more than possible name for the project.

This is a peculiar strategy, since The usual thing in these cases is to add the names of the services instead of simply eliminating one of them. This is what has happened, for example, with the recently launched SkyShowtime, which adds the names of two of the many channels that the platform hosts. In any case, it seems that soon we will have the opportunity to see how this new plan works for the battered Warner Discovery.

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