HBO Maxa US video on demand streaming service, will merge with Discovery Plus starting from‘estate 2023. This was announced by the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery, David Zaslav, during an earnings call.
HBO Max and Discovery Plus will become a single platform
HBO Max e Discovery Plus, from summer 2023, they will merge into a single streaming platform. The new platform will focus on performance – it will take the best of the two existing services and merge it.
“HBO Max has a competitive feature set, but it has had performance and customer issues,” he said Zaslav. In fact, the app has streaming issues when many people tune in for big dates like the Euphoria and Succession TV series. He went on to state that Discovery Plus has a better tech stack and would become the centerpiece of the new service that will combine HBO’s platform content with Discovery Plus content and technology.
“We think the product will be great,” he said Zaslavafter assuring listeners that the company would not delete certain content on HBO Max. This news comes after a week of anxiety for loyal users.
At the beginning of the week, in fact, the company decided to remove the Batgirl movie – almost completed – from the release calendar. Other HBO Max exclusive movies have disappeared from the service, but are still available for purchase or rental. Several outlets then reported that things weren’t going so well for HBO Max and the creative development teams working there. Zaslav was therefore forced to reassure usersinsisting that HBO Max’s programming overall is good and enjoys the support of the company in general.
The name of the service will be revealed later
The merger between the service of HBO and Discovery Plus, already anticipated a few months ago, seems to be possible just a good thing. Users will be able to enjoy the contents of HBO Max on a more performing and technologically advanced platformfree of annoying bugs.
It’s not clear yet though what will be the name of the new combined service, most likely the company will decide to leave in the name a reference to both platforms, especially “HBO”. Another unknown is also the prezzo. Discovery Pluscurrently offers a plan in the United States with ads included at $ 5 and ad-free at $ 7. HBO Maxon the other hand, it costs 10 dollars o 15 dollars respectively with or without advertising. The two tariffs – ideally – will be combined, but it is not yet known how.
After the release of the new platform in the United States during the summer of 2023, the company plans to make the service available also in Latin America in the autumn of the same year; in Europe during the first months of 2024in Asia Pacific in mid-2024 and in the remaining markets in autumn 2024. This means that, in theory, we will be able to access HBO content also from Italy for the first time: in fact, only the Discovery + service is available from us.