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HBO Max was renamed Max, and Warner Bros. Discovery lost subscribers (www.theverge.com)
submitted 3 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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HBO Max was renamed Max, and Warner Bros. Discovery lost subscribers::Warner Bros. Discovery lost 1.8 million subscribers in the second quarter of 2023 following HBO Max’s rebrand to Max. The company now has 95.8 million subscribers across all of its services.

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[–] 265 points 3 years ago* (12 children)

In all seriousness, why the hell would a company already branded the "Home Box Office" run away from the moniker in the era of at-home online movie binging. You have some of the most intuitive psychic real estate shy of Twitter, a company whose name will never be changed because the brand recognition is so high. Who could have possibly gotten you to believe changing it to something as vague and ill-suited as Max was a good idea?

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  • [+] 70 points 3 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)
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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Still calling it HBO Max would have tainted the brand

    Is there an HBO left that isn't Max? It isn't as though I can stream the Good HBO sans the Bad reality tv crap.

    Which also tells you what they think of customers

    I get HBO through AT&T as a perk. I don't subscribe to it independently. Its possible that someone at HBO noticed the bulk of their user base has some kind of arrangement like this and thinks just drawing down revenue from these default subscriptions is preferable to chasing new user sign-ups through attractive content and salesmanship.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago*

    I sign into "max" now and get bombarded on the home screen with basic cable reality show trash, and every time that happens it just makes me want to use it less. The only thing keeping me coming back is the occasional Soderbergh project and an as-of-yet still decent catalogue of movies, though even that has dropped off noticeably.

    I would drop my subscription if it wasn't bundled into my phone plan.

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  • [–] 19 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Right?! My first thought was "Max? You mean like Cinemax? Did Cinemax buy HBO??" Well, turns out, the OPPOSITE is true. In what world is Cinemax the more valuable brand than HBO???

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    What’s the most baffling to me is that WB owned HBO and Cinemax when they created HBOMax, but they chose not to include Cinemax content.

    I guess these days among the executive class, it’s just really cool to purposefully mismanage your IP.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    It's because they didn't buy Cinemax to combine them into a bigger more valuable brand with more IP. They bought out Cinemax to eliminate the competition. And they did it around the same time that all the streaming services started taking off, so they obviously got their asses kicked by Netflix. Cable TV as a whole has really suffered since Netflix and Prime got really big.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Sorry to repost. I immediately tossed in a thing about the rebrand and then saw this, so I'm hitting it again because it frames the rebrand as knowing and deliberate (as opposed to a fuck up).

    Bad Faith podcast had an episode on the strike a couple weeks back. The guests (strikers) talked about how Zaslav renaming HBO to Max is right inline with their intent to churn out "good enough" content to increase profits rather than increase quality. They likened it to a signal to Wall Street to improve their share value.

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  • [+] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)
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