Scene from season 3 of White Lotus.
Supply: HBO
HBO turned HBO Max turned Max. Now, it is going to be HBO Max as soon as extra.
Warner Bros. Discovery is renaming its streaming platform once more beginning this summer time, restoring a reputation it ditched just two years ago. The corporate introduced the rebranding Wednesday throughout its upfront presentation in New York.
The change comes as Warner Bros. Discovery seeks to cut back its quantity of content material and give attention to high quality programming and storytelling.
“The highly effective development we have now seen in our international streaming service is constructed across the high quality of our programming,” mentioned David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, in a press release. “Right now, we’re bringing again HBO, the model that represents the best high quality in media, to additional speed up that development within the years forward.”
The corporate’s streaming enterprise has rotated its profitability by nearly $3 billion within the final two years and scaled globally with round 22 million subscribers added within the final yr. Warner Bros. Discovery goals to have greater than 150 million subscribers by the top of 2026.
Nonetheless, Warner Bros. Discovery misplaced dwell rights to Nationwide Basketball Affiliation video games starting subsequent season. And the corporate has centered on paying down debt reasonably than spending on new content material to compete with Netflix, which has greater than 300 million subscribers.
Paradoxically, the HBO Max branding was meant to showcase its aggressive international streaming ambitions. Now, WBD is altering the identify again to emphasise the alternative — high quality over amount.
“We are going to proceed to give attention to what makes us distinctive – not all the things for everybody in a family, however one thing distinct and nice for adults and households,” mentioned JB Perrette, president and CEO of streaming at Warner Bros. Discovery, in a press release. “It is actually not subjective, not even controversial – our programming simply hits completely different.”
Competitor Disney has taken the same tack, with CEO Bob Iger noting in current investor calls that the best way to win in streaming shall be high quality content material.
The legacy media corporations have all struggled to realize profitability of their streaming companies since launching their very own companies in recent times. That is led to an elevated emphasis on promoting tiers, crack downs on password sharing and extra streaming service bundles.
The Upfronts week in New York has already been heavy on naming information. ESPN introduced its upcoming flagship streaming app shall be named simply ESPN. Fox mentioned its forthcoming streamer shall be named Fox One. And, final week Comcast’s cable portfolio spinoff introduced its new holding company name, Versant.
Warner Bros. Discovery first launched its standalone streaming service HBO Max in 2020 when the model was nonetheless owned by AT&T. The “Max” moniker was added to indicate that the platform would have a big selection of content material, from actuality TV, documentaries, children programming and films, in addition to the status branding of HBO titles.
On the time, management believed that HBO had too small of an viewers, a lot of which was U.S.-based, and that there was extra worth in making HBO a sub-brand inside a bigger streaming providing.
The service was later renamed Max in 2023. That change got here after the merging of Discovery Communications and WarnerMedia, which was divested from AT&T in 2022. Content material from Discovery+ was added to HBO Max below the brand new identify.
Now, two years later, Warner Bros. Discovery has reversed course.
Disclosure: Comcast is the father or mother firm of CNBC. Versant would be the new father or mother firm of CNBC below the proposed cable portfolio spinoff.