Max Brand Reversal Driven By Warner's Changing Ambitions, Direction

Forbes

16-05-2025

Would a streaming service by any other name smell as sweet as the anodyne and largely meaningless 'Max?' Uh, yes, and probably be a lot more popular long-term with consumers around the planet.
At this week's New York upfronts presentation to advertisers, Warner Bros. Discovery executives said its Max streaming service this summer would revert to its natal name, HBO Max. The reversion reinstates the only brand that compels many of the service's 122 million customers to pony up several dollars in subscription fees each month.
It's also a sign of where WBD and HBO Max are headed next after an often wobbly half-decade that included one huge and debt-ridden merger, a ruinously expensive ambition to compete with Netflix and Amazon, and a reconsideration of what a smaller, more sustainable media company could be post-Streaming Wars.
The good news about the return to HBO Max, as HBO chief Casey Bloys joked, "is I have a drawer full of stationery from the last time around."
It took WBD a few years to figure it out, though.
The streaming service launched almost exactly five years ago, and was called HBO Max by two sets of leaders ago. The launch was a shambolic mess, hobbled by the pandemic lockdown that started two months earlier, and which shut down several planned original shows. Jason Kilar, who had just become head of what was then called Warner Media and was part of AT&T, was enraged enough at the messy debut that some marketing executives soon would move on.
Perhaps Warner executives were suffering from a near-fatal over-exposure of HBO-branded streaming services at the time. There was the premium cable mothership, called simply HBO, but also included proto-streaming, on-demand services HBO Go and HBO Now.
Consumers could be forgiven for some market confusion before HBO Go and Now went. Even after they shuffled onto an ice floe, confusion remained. HBO Max included pretty much all of HBO's current and library content and a bunch of other great stuff from Warner's rich library of films and TV stretching back most of a century. If you were an HBO cable subscriber, you even got to use HBO Max for free. Deal! Provided you could figure out this newfangled streaming app thing.
Fast forward, past the 2022 merger of reality-show haven Discovery Networks with the much-bigger Warner Media. Now, new leadership wanted to signify that they had an 'everything' streaming app capable of competing with the big boys, even if it didn't have their international reach, bottomless pockets, and financially sustainable scale.
Max featured shows for awards-driven fans of premium original scripted series and features, sports geeks (eventually), classic movie obsessives, animation fans young and old, and trashy reality show lovers, among much else. Basically, the idea was to provide a lot of something for everyone who might be willing to pay for it.
So, in 2023, HBO Max lost half its name, leaving just the minimalist Max to stand in for one of television's most storied brands.
'Even two years ago, the idea was still that we were gonna be something for everybody,' Bloys told the upfronts audience. 'Everybody wanted to be the next Netflix, and it's so incredibly expensive to do that ... 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 the question now is what does the re-christened HBO Max become?
Per Bloys, 'We did a lot of research and focus groups. The things subscribers want from us are HBO programming, scripted dramas, comedies, documentaries, the pay-one [licensed] movies, library movies, and basically the Warner Bros. TV library.'
Not on that list: children's programming and animation. Earlier this year, WBD cut ties with Sesame Street, is carving down what's left of Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, and mothballed access to many classic kid-focused animated shows such as Looney Tunes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Max's children's shows couldn't compete with CocoMelon (on Netflix and YouTube) and Bluey (on Disney+). So HBO Max won't have much in the way of children's programming, and less of animation, once a strong suit.
WBD has finally begun to make modest streaming profits ($339 million in Q1 adjusted EBITDA, after too many quarters of even bigger losses. And Max continues to roll out internationally, already in around 75 countries with plenty more to come. The international push has helped drive subscriber growth, which last quarter added 5.3 million more subs.
That still leaves Max far behind Netflix, which operates in more than 190 countries, with Q1 operating income of $3.35 billion, up 27% over 2024. Netflix stopped reporting its total subscriber count in the previous quarter, at 301 million but continues to far outstrip everyone else but YouTube.
Given that reality, one sign of good management might be to do something different. That's what's happening.
Based on Bloys' comments, and those of CEO David Zaslav, 'different' means fewer, bigger swings with content spending than Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. That less-is-more approach leverages Warner's deep library of films and TV shows, and HBO's still reliable knack for producing culture-grabbing originals such as House of Dragons, Hacks, and The Last of Us.
It also may set the stage for further deal-making by Zaslav, who welcomed Donald Trump's election with comments about hoped-for deregulation and openness to mergers & acquisitions. Given many other macro uncertainties, we'll see if anything happens this year, but it's safe to say the spirit is willing if the deal is solid.
Accordingly, earlier this year, the company reorganized its operations, putting its burgeoning streaming service and the studios behind its movies, DC superhero franchises, games, and television production on one side, and the company's cable networks in a separate division.
Many in Hollywood expect that reorg is a predicate to spinning off WBD's cable operations (TNT, CNN, Discovery, etc), perhaps similar to what Comcast is already doing with most of its cable networks other than Bravo.
Certainly, rebranding to HBO Max, emphasizing a brand that means quality television, would nicely accommodate the bright line the reorganization draws between the growing streaming and production side versus the fading cable networks. At least people will know what they're getting when they sign up, far more than they ever did with 'Max.'
By the way, HBO Max isn't the only streaming product based on a vastly popular brand that's getting an official new/old name this week. Elsewhere at the upfronts, Disney CEO Bob Iger said the everything-on-ESPN streaming app expected to launch before football season this year will officially be called (drum roll, please) ESPN.
That's a shift, but at least a sensical one, from the long-awaited project's internal code name of 'ESPN Flagship.' Flagship suggested the app's vital importance to the continued success of the Worldwide Leader, especially as its cable birthplace continues to fade. At least somebody at Disney got this branding thing right.