A few weeks ago, Warner Bros. Discovery advanced the first entertainment formats that will be part of MAX’s local content offering in Spain.
The new service, which will debut in the spring of this year, will include entertainment titles such as Beijing Express and local adaptations of international hits such as Adventure in balls y Naked Attraction.
With this announcement, the characteristics of MAX begin to emerge, which will dispense with the HBO brand in its commercial name to lean towards more general entertainmenttrusting that this openness will allow it to seduce a key audience to reach large numbers of subscribers.
The merger that changed everything
May marks the first anniversary of HBO’s disappearance from the commercial name of the Warner Bros. Discovery platform in the US.
He rebranding It took place just three years after the launch of HBO Max, a project led by the then CEO of Warner Media, Jason Kilar, at the request of its new owners, the telecommunications company AT&T. The vocation of HBO Max was to use the muscle of the entire catalog of the Warner entertainment conglomerate to compete on the front line in the Streaming Wars ,using the prestige of HBO as a spearhead.
Two years after launch, AT&T decided to throw in the towel. In 2022, Warner Media was segregated to merge it with Discovery’s assets.
Although they decided to retain the majority of the shares, operational management was left in the hands of David Zaslav, former CEO of Discovery and CEO of the resulting company: Warner Bros. Discovery. Zaslav has been one of the great drivers of this change and also of the shift in the platform’s editorial line.
The company, whose direct-to-consumer operations have failed to surpass the 100 million subscriber barrier worldwide, needs to seduce a mass of customers that is not in HBO’s niche, but in Discovery’s. With that goal in mind, the move makes a lot of sense.
It´s not TV. It´s not (only) HBO
According to statements by Patrizzio Spagnoleto, global marketing director of Warner Bros Discovery, in an interview in The Wall Street Journalit was not possible to keep HBO in the name as an umbrella for an incredibly varied library and expect consumer perception to not be conditioned.
MAX is a simplification that allows for a more holistic presentation of the platform. Its offer, in addition to bringing together the portfolio of the former Warner Media, absorbs the catalog of Discovery, a strong company in non-fiction and entertainment formats.
For Spagnoleto, the company understands MAX as a mosaic with many pieces in which HBO will have an important presence, but coexisting with other relevant brands such as DC or Warner Bros. In this way, the content of the emblematic cable television channel becomes one more incentive to sign up for the service, instead of being the main attraction for hiring.
MAX has decided to embrace the same value proposition that Netflix decided to follow at the beginning of its international expansion: be the service for each member of the household and for each moment of the day. And that requires a lot of variety.
“For the launch of Max we will continue to produce quality scripted content and renew the non-scripted offering, adding premium documentaries and entertainment programs that attract an even larger audience,” says Laura Carafoli, vice president of TV Networks & Digital Local Production Italy & Iberia, in the press release issued by the company.
And he continues: “Therefore, we are delighted to announce these three new exceptional titles to Max’s local content offering (referring to Pekin Express, Adventure in bare bones y Naked Attraction). Three formats with a consolidated track record, which tell exciting true stories with irresistible characters and the highest possible production values.”
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Much more than HBO
The first communications from HBO Max Spain revolve around the idea of expanding and diversifying its content offering. One of the inevitable questions is the impact of this new value proposition in a service that, since last year, has been licensing many of its catalog gems to its great competitor: Netflix. The most recent addition has been Sex in New York.
In addition to the revenue from this license, MAX will benefit greatly from the new generation of audiences that the scale of the Cats company can provide. And that will ultimately have a direct impact on the sequel And Just Like That, which can only be seen on its platform (at least for now). But no one is aware that this dissemination of content partially erodes the incentive for hiring.
After a year of cuts and very unpopular programming decisions, the strategy is clear: there is strength in numbers. For Warner Bros. Discovery that means not relying on quality as much as on abundance and diversity. The question is not how many people they will be able to seduce with the new proposal, but how many HBO fans will not be seduced by watching the next season of The Last of Us beside Adventure in balls.
2024-01-28 11:58:26
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