HBO Max was renamed Max, and Warner Bros. Discovery lost subscribers
theverge.com
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
At the same time they made the name change they also eliminated a bunch of content and highlight a lot more of the reality stuff that might not have the same draw.
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
I had HBO in some form for 20 years, the many things they did to destroy HBO's dna in the name of short term profit ended that loyalty.
They shelved projects people worked on, that is their professional reputation, for a tax break.
They cancelled series that legions of fans were invested in.
The CEO even crowed about how great it will be to start generating cheap to produce "reality" show garbage instead of quality content.
Insatiable, capitalistic greed just turns whatever it touches to shit. A race to the bottom.
HBO was known for low volume but high quality content. I think Apple is trying to copy them (at exceedingly low volumes), but there is really no other service in that space.
Disney+ is similar. Obviously they have the massive library of movies, but their TV shows have been fairly similar to Apple TV.
I don't get why they made Max a completely different app. I mean I also don't get dropping the hbo monicker, but why did I have to get a brand new app instead of them just reskining hbo max
Kinda like rebranding Twitter into X
To be fair with that one, that's purely Musk and his fascination with the letter X.
When you're one of (the?) richest people in the world, you get to do completely idiotic things and they never have any real negative impact on your life.
is the letter X really all that fascinating? I can think of a number of letters far more fascinating than X.
Like what's up with the letter W? Shits kinda crazy, just a bunch of lines and shit.
Literally everyone and their mom is sleeping on the letter Z...
Oh, and don't even get me started on the letter O. Just think about that for a second. Is it one line? Or 0 lines? Or an infinite line? Circles are fucking crazy bro
Given what's going on in Ukraine and Russia I doubt many orgs want to use Z, although by that logic I'm surprised Elon didn't pick it instead of X
X is the core component of a Nazi swastika, so theres that.
Well now we've heard from the stoner contingent 😛
HBO = my brain thinks Game of Thrones, Sopranos, The Last of Us, Band of Brothers, Chernobyl. Literally decades and decades of quality premium content.
MAX = porn. My brain immediately associates the name with porn. Idk why.
For me it's because of Cinemax - ie Skinemax - which used to be associated with the softcore porn they'd play late at night.
It always mystified me that HBO Max was even able to use that name since it was so evocative of another premium cable network.
Skinemax, the Saturday night Shannon Tweed special.
Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon
I swear that companies are really misunderstanding how most people interact with brands, or I am. But given recent events, I think it's the companies. On another topic, for reasons I cannot fathom, Schwans home frozen food delivery is re-branding from Schwans' (which is hard for me to spell, but easy to say) that it's been since the 1950s and is widely understood and recognized. What are they re-branding to? It sounds like they got right up to date with mid 90s Internet company branding, going with Yelloh! (I think). No one wants to say Yelloh!. It looks stupid, and somehow more out of fashion than their old logo.
We've got whatever the heck is going on with Twitter/X, we've got this (Yea, no one recognizes HBO, that's OLD./s) The Great Courses Plus renamed Wondrium (which is again, giving up a rather well known brand in some niches with an obvious idea that it's slightly different as a subscription). At least this doesn't entirely sound / look stupid, and they added content when doing it, but still.
I probably could go on, but just... why? IDK - have you ever looked at an existing brand and thought - oh, that's too dated? Usually companies pull this stuff to "trick" people into thinking it's a different company, like when Blackwater became whatever, or Jeep etc became Stellantis. Such self owns.
It's pretty ironic how companies will spend so much money on advertising to gain brand recognition, but then throw it away on a whim.
I imagine executive meetings with people rambling about (an already well established) brand cannibalizing (what could become, if everything goes perfectly, an equally or even more recognized) brand. Basically, throwing away what you have for what you could have in the future.
It's just like spending, what was it, 44 billion dollars or something like that to own Twitter, and not even a year later you drop the brand and rename it X. Like, dude, any decent programmer or sysadmin could spin up a copy of Twitter in a few days of work. You paid $44 billion for the brand.
44 billion for the brand, but more importantly the user base. Although let's not discount the tech behind the scenes. Any decent programmer or sysadmin might be able to spin up a copy of Twitter in a few days. But it's not going to scale to the size Twitter is, and have all the moderation and legal tools Twitter does (although Elon is gutting those by the day), integrate into as many places as Twitter does, have the app infrastructure Twitter does, etc.
But regardless, all those things are irrelevant without people actually using the service. No clone is going to have the user base, and even with the rebrand to X, Elon still has a lot of users. Not as many as when he started, but still a lot. That's what the 44 billion bought.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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 has previously hinted at incorporating news and sports into Max, and rumors suggest that it could add live CNN broadcasts to the platform.
As Hollywood producers as well as writers and actors butt heads over the use of AI and streaming residuals, Zaslav said it’s “important” that the strike gets settled soon.
“We’re hopeful that all sides will get back to the negotiating rooms so that the strikes get resolved in a way that the writers and actors feel they are fairly compensated and their efforts and contributions are fully valued.”
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and Writers Guild of America are set to have their first meeting since the strike began on Friday.
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I agree that these changes have all been incredibly stupid and devalue one of the few remaining producers of quality TV (HBO), but I think that this is missing the point. The key is this:
In other words, fill up the service with cheap / easy to produce reality crap and hike up prices over time. Revenue goes up and costs go way down. People drift away but you keep growing the bottom line, at least for now. The shareholders rejoice and the consumers lose.
Short term profit > Longevity
Every single time.
The quality of the entire thing went down sharply too.
The menu configuration is nearing Amazon Prime levels of stupidity when they used to have one of the easiest to navigate.
Right, the title implies it has something to do with the name change, which is silly. The reason Max has fewer subscribers than HBO did is that HBO was objectively better than Max is.
I also saw a lot of posts from people that just had issues even getting logged in or with opening the app itself. Honestly it's embarrassing for such a large company to look so incompetent.
I want to pay for max so I can watch warrior season 3 and let their BS algorithm know there's interest in it and not cancel it outright. They don't even allow subscribers from my country UK so I have no choice but to pirate. They also have not released the season 2 bluray yet and I'm not gonna get the season 1 one if I'm just gonna end up with an incomplete collection cause this company is just allergic to taking my money.
Warrior is great!
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=0rSHAhXJ0ZQ&
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I was a subscriber and there was no smooth move over to max. I had to keep resetting my password every time I logged in and then eventually couldn’t get into either site even moments after a reset. Eventually said fuck it and cancelled.
If it’s anything more than barely inconvenient to use your service I’ll spend my money elsewhere
Having to configure settings all over again on every single device pissed me off, especially since the new app didn't even have subtitles customization of any kind. As someone who uses subtitles for almost all viewing, nothing turns me off of a streaming service faster than being stuck with shitty black bars and gigantic blocky text by default and being unable to change it.
And for fuck's sake, nobody likes video previews with sound, and you can take your credit-skipping autoplay and shove it up your corporate ass.
You literally cannot change the fucking size of the subtitles anymore, at least on Android or Chromecast. So you're stuck with giant letters, black background. It's the most infuriating shit of all time, HBO Max had options to change these things, I can't believe that 1 programmer couldn't solve this in a single day.
I feel like Netflix is the only one with a sensible default subtitle size.
Everyone else is like "Oh, you need subtitles. ARE YOU DEAF? IF WE MAKE THE LETTERS EXTRA BIG WILL YOU HEAR THEM BETTER!"
No motherfucker, I just need them because modern audio mixing is a fucking mess and actors have started mumbling. This is what happens when all the stage actors retire or die. I never had trouble understanding Alan Rickman or Tim Curry. They didn't need subtitles. But them you get Matthew McConaughey, and he's all "mmmhmmhm Murph" even without the spaceship engine noises, like even his fucking name is mumbled. Fuck you.
:)
It doesn't help that TVs don't include decent speakers anymore. A soundbar is a minimum, although I've seen those start to cheap out on the speakers too. Poor audio quality makes humans less understandable.
Now they should cut more letters and just make it x. That's called branding efficiency.
Keep that stock price at 12 bucks.
My 27$ per stock investment back in the day was my worst decision so far...
"I'm never going to financially recover from this".
y'arr
What happened to Cinemax?
Banshee and The Warrior are some of the best action TV around
LOL you can't even have a conversation with this name.
"Oh I've been watching this awesome new show, it's so good."
"oh yeah, where can I watch it?"
"max"
"...???..."
"it's on max"
"what? max what?"
"it's the old hbo, it's just max now though"
"hbo renamed themselves to max?"
"no ... but .... "
"okay nevermind"
Disney runs multiple brands. They ran family friendly films mostly under Disney and pg-13 type content under another (more complicated now after their buying spree).
Discovery absolutely should have done something similar. Show films intended for mature audiences under HBO. Run family friendly content under Discovery. Make them both under the same umbrella (HBO Discovery, perhaps). Create subscriptions for one or the other or both from the same app. But don’t throw away the HBO brand!
Also half of these apps have the exact same UX, whats going on here?
And they all equally suck. It’s really amazing how they can all be so terrible at the same time.
Idk if it’s necessarily related to the name but haven’t they been getting rid of a ton of beloved animated shows?
I think the renaming is dumb, but the thing that really pisses me off is their cancellation “special offer” that leaves you paying more permanently.
Got rid of omniverse but gained myth busters
I started a discovery plus account because I wanted to watch Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs again, after all these years. Then immediately after, the merger happened and they came to max (without commercials like on my discovery trial), so I immediately canceled discovery plus.
Very dumb rebrand. I like all the trashy TLC content don't get me wrong, but changing the name was completely unnecessary.
I remember when TLC was the learning channel. Used to be awesome.
If you like that reality garbage, I won't yuck your yum, but I enjoyed not having to see any of it. I miss being able to forget that shit like Obese Hoarder Wars or Little Person with 13 Kids exists.