Warner Bros. Discovery is feeling the effects of the Max merge.
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.
Right, the title implies it has something to do with the name change, which is silly. The reason Max has fewer subscribers than HBO did is that HBO was objectively better than Max is.
I also saw a lot of posts from people that just had issues even getting logged in or with opening the app itself. Honestly it’s embarrassing for such a large company to look so incompetent.
I swear that companies are really misunderstanding how most people interact with brands, or I am. But given recent events, I think it’s the companies. On another topic, for reasons I cannot fathom, Schwans home frozen food delivery is re-branding from Schwans’ (which is hard for me to spell, but easy to say) that it’s been since the 1950s and is widely understood and recognized. What are they re-branding to? It sounds like they got right up to date with mid 90s Internet company branding, going with Yelloh! (I think). No one wants to say Yelloh!. It looks stupid, and somehow more out of fashion than their old logo.
We’ve got whatever the heck is going on with Twitter/X, we’ve got this (Yea, no one recognizes HBO, that’s OLD./s)
The Great Courses Plus renamed Wondrium (which is again, giving up a rather well known brand in some niches with an obvious idea that it’s slightly different as a subscription). At least this doesn’t entirely sound / look stupid, and they added content when doing it, but still.
I probably could go on, but just… why? IDK - have you ever looked at an existing brand and thought - oh, that’s too dated? Usually companies pull this stuff to “trick” people into thinking it’s a different company, like when Blackwater became whatever, or Jeep etc became Stellantis. Such self owns.
Money makes people think they’re special which of course means they can’t have lowly common poor people names. To the absolute detriment of their kids. I would be livid if I got some of the stupid ass names these people are cursing their children with I stg
It depends on the company. Most of the time it’s somebody in charge fancying a certain name for no reason whatsoever and everyone around them kissing their ass about how great it is.
Sometimes it’s a little more organized and everybody at the table starts spit bowling names until somebody in charge goes yeah I like that and then they’re All falling over each other too gosh about how great it is.
Smart places hire an overpriced PR firm who does market research and then listens to their advice.
Years ago we started a new project. It was exactly the same as our existing project, but with a few minor new features and a fancy new four letter name. I wasn’t high enough on the totem pole to be included in the discussions about the project It just came to me to help do the work.
Oh great name I guess what’s it stand for? Oh uhh nothing. We just made it up. Really? It sounds like it should be a bird or something. Nope we looked it up It doesn’t have any meaning.
A few weeks later I’m driving into work a different way than I normally take and there’s a smoke stack with the damn four letter name on the side of it. They named the new product after a local company who probably named themselves after someone’s last name.
For the next couple of years every time anyone asked about the product the very first thing they asked is where the name came from. Yeah I don’t know, they just made some s*** up.
How about they fix the fucking max app. I don’t care about the rebrand and what ever else blah blah blah. Just fix the fucking app. It’s shit on all 3 of my tvs, constantly buffering, freezing, jumping back several minutes and repeating etc etc. It’s not my connection, every other streaming service works as intended with no issues on all of my tvs.
Everyone of these counts, thought, you know what, we will just make our own streaming platform, how hard could it be?
now they probably realized that it’s hard, wonder how long before shit like HBO Max, Peacock, Whatever the one with with Star Trek is. How long before they just go back and license out their shit to a competent company, like they should, ideally more than one.
They also didn’t have to make me download a new app, they could have updated the assets from HBOMax. Now I have to create a Samsung account to download it on my TV
I don’t get why they made Max a completely different app. I mean I also don’t get dropping the hbo monicker, but why did I have to get a brand new app instead of them just reskining hbo max
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?
Because they want to bog it down with shitty titles (quantity vs quality) to appear more competitive with more programming and don’t want to degrade the HBO brand.
Not to mention all the happy nostalgia from their PRIMARY TARGET CUSTOMERS who were kids in the 80s and still fondly remember the HBO feature presentation intro.
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???
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.
It comes across as if it was a business decision without regard for their customers…without the basic understanding that their customers ARE their business.
Removed as a protest against the community’s support for campaigns to bring about the deaths of members of marginalized groups, and opposition to private entities working to prevent such campaigns, together with it’s mindless flaming and downvoting of anyone who disagrees.
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.
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.
Removed as a protest against the community’s support for campaigns to bring about the deaths of members of marginalized groups, and opposition to private entities working to prevent such campaigns, together with it’s mindless flaming and downvoting of anyone who disagrees.
I want to pay for max so I can watch warrior season 3 and let their BS algorithm know there’s interest in it and not cancel it outright. They don’t even allow subscribers from my country UK so I have no choice but to pirate. They also have not released the season 2 bluray yet and I’m not gonna get the season 1 one if I’m just gonna end up with an incomplete collection cause this company is just allergic to taking my money.
I agree that these changes have all been incredibly stupid and devalue one of the few remaining producers of quality TV (HBO), but I think that this is missing the point. The key is this:
Notably, the loss in subscribers didn’t seem to affect streaming revenue. It grew to $2.73 billion this quarter, marking a 13 percent increase.
In other words, fill up the service with cheap / easy to produce reality crap and hike up prices over time. Revenue goes up and costs go way down. People drift away but you keep growing the bottom line, at least for now. The shareholders rejoice and the consumers lose.
Disney runs multiple brands. They ran family friendly films mostly under Disney and pg-13 type content under another (more complicated now after their buying spree).
Discovery absolutely should have done something similar. Show films intended for mature audiences under HBO. Run family friendly content under Discovery. Make them both under the same umbrella (HBO Discovery, perhaps). Create subscriptions for one or the other or both from the same app. But don’t throw away the HBO brand!
To be fair with that one, that’s purely Musk and his fascination with the letter X.
When you’re one of (the?) richest people in the world, you get to do completely idiotic things and they never have any real negative impact on your life.
is the letter X really all that fascinating? I can think of a number of letters far more fascinating than X.
Like what’s up with the letter W? Shits kinda crazy, just a bunch of lines and shit.
Literally everyone and their mom is sleeping on the letter Z…
Oh, and don’t even get me started on the letter O. Just think about that for a second. Is it one line? Or 0 lines? Or an infinite line? Circles are fucking crazy bro
I was a subscriber and there was no smooth move over to max. I had to keep resetting my password every time I logged in and then eventually couldn’t get into either site even moments after a reset. Eventually said fuck it and cancelled.
If it’s anything more than barely inconvenient to use your service I’ll spend my money elsewhere
Having to configure settings all over again on every single device pissed me off, especially since the new app didn’t even have subtitles customization of any kind. As someone who uses subtitles for almost all viewing, nothing turns me off of a streaming service faster than being stuck with shitty black bars and gigantic blocky text by default and being unable to change it.
And for fuck’s sake, nobody likes video previews with sound, and you can take your credit-skipping autoplay and shove it up your corporate ass.
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The quality of the entire thing went down sharply too.
Right, the title implies it has something to do with the name change, which is silly. The reason Max has fewer subscribers than HBO did is that HBO was objectively better than Max is.
I also saw a lot of posts from people that just had issues even getting logged in or with opening the app itself. Honestly it’s embarrassing for such a large company to look so incompetent.
I swear that companies are really misunderstanding how most people interact with brands, or I am. But given recent events, I think it’s the companies. On another topic, for reasons I cannot fathom, Schwans home frozen food delivery is re-branding from Schwans’ (which is hard for me to spell, but easy to say) that it’s been since the 1950s and is widely understood and recognized. What are they re-branding to? It sounds like they got right up to date with mid 90s Internet company branding, going with Yelloh! (I think). No one wants to say Yelloh!. It looks stupid, and somehow more out of fashion than their old logo.
We’ve got whatever the heck is going on with Twitter/X, we’ve got this (Yea, no one recognizes HBO, that’s OLD./s) The Great Courses Plus renamed Wondrium (which is again, giving up a rather well known brand in some niches with an obvious idea that it’s slightly different as a subscription). At least this doesn’t entirely sound / look stupid, and they added content when doing it, but still.
I probably could go on, but just… why? IDK - have you ever looked at an existing brand and thought - oh, that’s too dated? Usually companies pull this stuff to “trick” people into thinking it’s a different company, like when Blackwater became whatever, or Jeep etc became Stellantis. Such self owns.
deleted by creator
I mean, you have heard about what Musk named/wanted to name his child, yes?
Money makes people think they’re special which of course means they can’t have lowly common poor people names. To the absolute detriment of their kids. I would be livid if I got some of the stupid ass names these people are cursing their children with I stg
It depends on the company. Most of the time it’s somebody in charge fancying a certain name for no reason whatsoever and everyone around them kissing their ass about how great it is.
Sometimes it’s a little more organized and everybody at the table starts spit bowling names until somebody in charge goes yeah I like that and then they’re All falling over each other too gosh about how great it is.
Smart places hire an overpriced PR firm who does market research and then listens to their advice.
Years ago we started a new project. It was exactly the same as our existing project, but with a few minor new features and a fancy new four letter name. I wasn’t high enough on the totem pole to be included in the discussions about the project It just came to me to help do the work.
Oh great name I guess what’s it stand for? Oh uhh nothing. We just made it up. Really? It sounds like it should be a bird or something. Nope we looked it up It doesn’t have any meaning.
A few weeks later I’m driving into work a different way than I normally take and there’s a smoke stack with the damn four letter name on the side of it. They named the new product after a local company who probably named themselves after someone’s last name.
For the next couple of years every time anyone asked about the product the very first thing they asked is where the name came from. Yeah I don’t know, they just made some s*** up.
How about they fix the fucking max app. I don’t care about the rebrand and what ever else blah blah blah. Just fix the fucking app. It’s shit on all 3 of my tvs, constantly buffering, freezing, jumping back several minutes and repeating etc etc. It’s not my connection, every other streaming service works as intended with no issues on all of my tvs.
Everyone of these counts, thought, you know what, we will just make our own streaming platform, how hard could it be?
now they probably realized that it’s hard, wonder how long before shit like HBO Max, Peacock, Whatever the one with with Star Trek is. How long before they just go back and license out their shit to a competent company, like they should, ideally more than one.
They also didn’t have to make me download a new app, they could have updated the assets from HBOMax. Now I have to create a Samsung account to download it on my TV
I don’t get why they made Max a completely different app. I mean I also don’t get dropping the hbo monicker, but why did I have to get a brand new app instead of them just reskining hbo max
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?
Because they want to bog it down with shitty titles (quantity vs quality) to appear more competitive with more programming and don’t want to degrade the HBO brand.
What brand is left after you’ve renamed the flagship service?
Its not like HBO Premium is some extra tier of service.
Not to mention all the happy nostalgia from their PRIMARY TARGET CUSTOMERS who were kids in the 80s and still fondly remember the HBO feature presentation intro.
Just reading that got the tune in my head
agree. These people are so up their own ass they can’t see.
deleted by creator
Its a classic for a reason.
I didn’t know that’s what I meant
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???
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.
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.
It comes across as if it was a business decision without regard for their customers…without the basic understanding that their customers ARE their business.
I hear Coca-Cola is going to rebrand itself to New Coke this year. Can’t fail!!
It would be more like if Coca Cola randomly decided to rebrand itself as Piss.
Removed as a protest against the community’s support for campaigns to bring about the deaths of members of marginalized groups, and opposition to private entities working to prevent such campaigns, together with it’s mindless flaming and downvoting of anyone who disagrees.
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.
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.
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.
Until those companies realize that it provides no value, and drop the added expense because they know their customers won’t care.
Removed as a protest against the community’s support for campaigns to bring about the deaths of members of marginalized groups, and opposition to private entities working to prevent such campaigns, together with it’s mindless flaming and downvoting of anyone who disagrees.
I want to pay for max so I can watch warrior season 3 and let their BS algorithm know there’s interest in it and not cancel it outright. They don’t even allow subscribers from my country UK so I have no choice but to pirate. They also have not released the season 2 bluray yet and I’m not gonna get the season 1 one if I’m just gonna end up with an incomplete collection cause this company is just allergic to taking my money.
deleted by creator
I agree that these changes have all been incredibly stupid and devalue one of the few remaining producers of quality TV (HBO), but I think that this is missing the point. The key is this:
In other words, fill up the service with cheap / easy to produce reality crap and hike up prices over time. Revenue goes up and costs go way down. People drift away but you keep growing the bottom line, at least for now. The shareholders rejoice and the consumers lose.
Short term profit > Longevity
Every single time.
Disney runs multiple brands. They ran family friendly films mostly under Disney and pg-13 type content under another (more complicated now after their buying spree).
Discovery absolutely should have done something similar. Show films intended for mature audiences under HBO. Run family friendly content under Discovery. Make them both under the same umbrella (HBO Discovery, perhaps). Create subscriptions for one or the other or both from the same app. But don’t throw away the HBO brand!
Keep that stock price at 12 bucks.
My 27$ per stock investment back in the day was my worst decision so far…
“I’m never going to financially recover from this”.
y’arr
Kinda like rebranding Twitter into X
To be fair with that one, that’s purely Musk and his fascination with the letter X.
When you’re one of (the?) richest people in the world, you get to do completely idiotic things and they never have any real negative impact on your life.
is the letter X really all that fascinating? I can think of a number of letters far more fascinating than X.
Like what’s up with the letter W? Shits kinda crazy, just a bunch of lines and shit.
Literally everyone and their mom is sleeping on the letter Z…
Oh, and don’t even get me started on the letter O. Just think about that for a second. Is it one line? Or 0 lines? Or an infinite line? Circles are fucking crazy bro
Well now we’ve heard from the stoner contingent 😛
Now they should cut more letters and just make it x. That’s called branding efficiency.
I was a subscriber and there was no smooth move over to max. I had to keep resetting my password every time I logged in and then eventually couldn’t get into either site even moments after a reset. Eventually said fuck it and cancelled.
If it’s anything more than barely inconvenient to use your service I’ll spend my money elsewhere
Having to configure settings all over again on every single device pissed me off, especially since the new app didn’t even have subtitles customization of any kind. As someone who uses subtitles for almost all viewing, nothing turns me off of a streaming service faster than being stuck with shitty black bars and gigantic blocky text by default and being unable to change it.
And for fuck’s sake, nobody likes video previews with sound, and you can take your credit-skipping autoplay and shove it up your corporate ass.
I think the renaming is dumb, but the thing that really pisses me off is their cancellation “special offer” that leaves you paying more permanently.