At the Warner Brothers upfront presentation Wednesday in New York City, the media company announced that MAX, its premium streaming service will be changing its name for the fourth time since its inception as HBO Now. The new name, which will be official this summer will be…..HBO Max.
The naming convention gyrations have plagued Warner Brothers since it was owned by AT&T and have basically led consumers to simply never getting the name of its services correct, ever. We had multiple services with DirecT in its name in one shape or form, a time when there was a service called HBO Go that only offered on demand content to cable customers while HBO Now offered HBO content to people who did not have cable to HBO Max which combined HBO Now and HBO Go into one service and login. Then, for some inexplicable reason, once people got used to saying HBO Max the company dropped HBO from the name. But there you go again.
The suits explain it by saying they came to a conclusion that people see HBO as the key brand in their portfolio along with the Warner Brothers library and do not value the idea of something for everybody mentality that led the company to try and shoehorn Sesame Street, The Sopranos, Bugs Bunny and Batman all into the same bucket of fun with a side of house flipping and fat sisters thrown in for good measure. That is not exactly how they put it but it is what they meant.
The big realization is that Warner Bros Discovery is admitting that it can not be Netflix. Only Netflix can be Netflix. There is a clear pecking order in the streaming world where consumers have given up on signing up for everything under the sun.
“We have accepted and understand that the majority of our subscribers at this point are going to have Netflix, and they’re going to have Amazon … So when someone is putting together their media diet, it’s about what you add to that,” said chairman and CEO of HBO and Max Content Casey Bloys.
There is no info as to whether this means that HBO Max will no longer carry Discovery Networks programming on the service. The company wisely left its stand alone reality TV-based streamer, Discovery+ in place even after adding a good chunk of its programming on Max. At the time Max was being positioned almost like a mini cable bundle offering HBO content, original Turner programming, The Warner Brothers Archive, Cartoon Network content, DC comics content, Discovery Network content and a perpetually free preview of CNN and TNT live feeds that were supposed to become part of another programming tier before the company ditched those plans and left the live feeds in place.
WBD has since been paring down its content and instead selling rights to its programming to other streaming services, including ironically Netflix, after its attempt to replace it. Original programming that was originally slated for Max, like Batman: The Caped Crusader, ended up instead of Amazon Prime Video.
Don’t expect this to be the last direction change at Warner Brothers. We still have the inevitable collapse of its DC Universe to come on the heels of Super Man’s almost certain disappointment at the box office, thanks to sky-high expectations from the studio aching for a hit. But that will be another story.
