“It’s (password crackdown) going to increase and really be a 12- to 18-month initiative as it rolls out to more subscriber cohorts here in the U.S. and globalizes later in the year and into ’26 and as the messaging on the password sharing gets more assertive over the course of the back half the year” and into next.
Nobody knows what they’re doing, so they?
Honestly should just change the whole thing to HBO.
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The utter mismanagement of corporate Warner Bros for the last forever has been wild
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They could even bring back the old slogan: ‘it’s not TV… it’s HBO’.
There could and probably will be a book written about how badly WBD has been run. The unreleased films, the poor financial decisions… you could fill a decently-sized book just with the ways they’ve run CNN into the ground, and now they’re planning to sell it and the other basic cable networks. Which will be ‘fun’ to watch.
Kind of says about the state of things when even CNN titled it like this:
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The name is not the problem. It will make no difference in a crowded streaming market.
At least people like @KICK-IT got something out of all of this nonsense.
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WBD wasted alot of money over April marketing MAX in Australia only to rebrand it as HBO Max now
They are useless on it
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Max changing its name again? That’s ridiculous.
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WBD has to possibly be one of the most mismanaged conglomerates in the world. Total incompetency all the way up.
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I think a lot of it too really stems all the way back to the 90s and early 2000s, following all the ownership changes from Time Inc to Turner and the disastrous AOL.
It’s always funny whenever I see an old show or movie come on with the original opening or ending Warner Bros logo and the various ownership tags on them from the respective eras.
Let’s not forget the whole New Line Cinema thing either. Turner bought them, then became a completely independent subsidiary (or apparently so anyway) after the the mid-90s merge, then decided just to bring it in-house with Warners in the late 2000s as a label rather than a company.
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Great analysis
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Very good - Zaslav has a lot to answer for.
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Following news of the rebrand, Michael Brooks, General Manager for Australia and New Zealand at Warner Bros. Discovery told Mediaweek, “The rationale behind this decision is completely consistent with the campaign we have had in market.
“We believe that success in streaming will be defined by quality, not volume of content (ie. “All Killer. No Filler”), and the HBO brand has been synonymous with distinct and high-quality programming for over 50 years.
“Max is known as the home of HBO so this should be a clean shift for consumers. The global rollout will take place over the Northern Hemisphere summer.”
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