Warner Bros. Discovery rebrands flagship streamer to Max

It’s not TV. It’s HBO Max.

Warner Bros. Discovery will rebrand its flagship streaming service HBO Max to Max next month, the company announced Wednesday, its latest attempt to improve its ability to attract paying customers in a crowded streaming landscape.

Max, which will officially debut in the US on May 23, will offer programming from HBO like Succession and The Last of Us alongside content from Discovery brands, like TLC and HGTV, and discovery+. Along with the rebrand comes a new tagline— “The One to Watch”—and a new color: Max, which will adopt the camera-lens-like O from the HBO logo into its lowercase A, will have a vivid royal blue background, as opposed to the bright purple of HBO Max.

The service, which debuted alongside new programming announcements across franchises like Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and theDC Universe, will cost subscribers the same as an HBO Max subscription currently does: $9.99 for an ad-supported tier and $15.99 for an ad-free tier. However, the company is moving some perks presently included in its ad-free tier, like higher-resolution streaming, more concurrent streams, and higher download limits, to a more expensive $19.99 tier called Max Ultimate. (Annual plans for each tier cost less.)

While discovery+ programming will be added to Max, the unscripted streamer will continue to operate as a standalone service.

Some existing HBO Max subscribers will see their apps automatically updated to Max, but other customers may have to take some additional steps to get the updated service. Either way, users will see their watch histories, login and billing information, and content preferences automatically migrated over to Max.

HB-no: The decision to drop HBO from the streamer’s moniker is designed to help make Max seem more family-friendly as the streamer looks to court kids viewers to help in its goals to retain subscribers and reduce churn, JB Perrette, president and CEO of global streaming and games at Warner Bros. Discovery said during a press event Wednesday.

• “We all love HBO, and it’s a brand that has been built over five decades to be the edgy, groundbreaking trendsetter in entertainment for adults, but it’s not exactly where parents would most eagerly drop off their kids,” Perrette said. “Not surprisingly, the category has not met its true potential on HBO Max.”
• The move is also designed to help preserve the HBO brand, Perrette added. “HBO is not TV; HBO is HBO,” he said. “It needs to stay that way, which is why we will privilege it in the product experience and also not push it to the breaking point by forcing it to take on the full breadth of this new content proposition had we kept the name in the service brand.”
• HBO will get top billing inside the Max app, and the cable brand will not change its content plans, Casey Bloys, chairman and CEO of HBO and HBO Max Content, said.

Wait, didn’t we just watch this show? Max arrives just three years after the rollout of HBO Max and just over two years since the US debut of discovery+. A lot has happened since then, including AT&T’s move to spin out WarnerMedia, creating the new Warner Bros. Discovery.

Since then, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has been aggressively cost-cutting to try to improve the combined company’s fortunes; Max, Perrette assured investors, remains part of the company’s broader strategy of prioritizing profitability over scale. Speaking of scale, HBO, HBO Max, and discovery+ ended 2022 with a total of 96.1 million subscribers worldwide.