Farewell, HBO. Hello, Max.
The new streaming service uniting HBO titles like “Succession” and “The White Lotus” with Discovery reality series like “My Feet Are Killing Me” and “Sister Wives” will be named Max, Warner Bros. Discovery executives announced on Wednesday.
The service, which will replace HBO Max, will debut on May 23, less than three years after the introduction of HBO Max. It will cost, at least for now, the price of HBO Max: $16 a month for a commercial-free experience, and $10 a month for an advertising-supported tier.
The app for Max will ditch the purple color scheme of HBO Max in favor of a blue-and-white one. The “a” in Max will have a white dot at its center, paying homage to the “O” in HBO, and the app will give prominent placement to the HBO brand, including its past, current and future programming. It will include a dedicated tile to the network.
Max will be the latest entrant in the so-called streaming wars. Entertainment executives have scrambled over the past year to make their services profitable instead of trumpeting subscriber counts. When Discovery merged with WarnerMedia, forming Warner Bros. Discovery, in April 2022, the potential for a combined streaming service was a critical part of the merger’s justification.
At a news conference on Wednesday at the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, Calif., company executives said they felt that, after 50 years of being marketed as a premium adult service, the HBO name was limiting to consumers, particularly children.
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“It was a brand built over five decades to be edgy, groundbreaking and a trendsetter for entertainment in adults,” JB Perrette, the president of global streaming at Warner Bros. Discovery, said of HBO. “It’s not exactly where parents would most eagerly drop off their kids.”
Casey Bloys, the chairman of HBO who has overseen the network’s programming since 2016, expressed some relief about the name change now that Discovery’s extensive library of reality and unscripted series would flood the service.
“What I am most concerned about is protecting the HBO brand,” he told reporters. “It is a premium brand. It’s not designed to be for mass audiences. And the more that you ask the HBO brand to take on more programming, I think the further it stretches it.”
Mr. Bloys announced several new programs for the service, including a new “Game of Thrones” spinoff and a series based on J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books.
But he quickly exited the stage when it was time for an announcement about several reality series from Discovery’s stable of brands, including a competition series from HGTV, “Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge,” and a TLC show, “Love & Translation.” Set on a remote island, the TLC series features three scantily-clad American men and a dozen women vying to find love. None of the women speak English.
Warner Bros. Discovery said it anticipated 130 million subscribers by 2025, nearly 100 million fewer than the current number of paying members for either Netflix or Disney — across Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+.
But Warner Bros. executives have argued that profitability is most important, not subscriber counts. They said Max and Discovery+ would break even by next year, and be profitable by 2025.
HBO has been on a roll in recent months with several hit series, including the debut seasons of “The House of the Dragon” and “The Last of Us,” but the amount of time consumers spend on HBO Max ranks well behind Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, according to Nielsen.
The company’s executives are hoping that Discovery’s more passive programming options will increase viewers’ time on the app and reduce the number of subscribers who cancel the service, said David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery.
“Holding subs is as important as adding subs,” Mr. Zaslav said. “Together, they pack a powerful one-two punch.”
