Tech News: HBO Max & Discovery Plus Combined Into One Platform Update: Stock tanking!

playahaitian

Rising Star
Certified Pussy Poster
HBO Max to Plus Itself With Discovery+
By Eric Vilas-Boas@e_vb_

8602164d30e0e605264808b1e78d3e01c2-hbo-max-discovery-plus.rsquare.w330.jpg



At your service.
Illustration: Martin Gee
Less than two years after the respective launches of both HBO Max and Discovery+, their soon-to-merge parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, has decided the single life just won’t do. Gunnar Wiedenfels, Discovery’s top finance bro and incoming CFO of the combined company, confirmed that the two streaming services would face the great capitalist dystopia hand in hand join forces, answering the first question we had when news of the merger broke. Wiedenfels’s comments — made at a banking conference and first reported by Variety — didn’t outline the particulars of what such a combined service would look like, but did confirm that the roll-up would likely start with a bundle before the services are fully integrated.
The Critics Newsletter
A weekly dispatch on the cultural discourse, sent Fridays.

“Right out of the gate, we’re working on getting the bundling approach ready, maybe a single sign-on, maybe ingesting content into the other product, etc., so that we can start to get some benefits early on,” he told a Palm Beach audience on Monday in partly cloudy Florida. “But the main thrust is going to be harmonizing the technology platform. Building one very, very strong combined direct-to-consumer product and platform, that’s going to take a while.” (By “a while,” he means once the merger is finalized, which could take another month or so; Discovery shareholders just voted to approve it on Friday.) We’ve reached out to HBO Max and Discovery+ for comment on this new capitalist future, and will update this piece if they have any other thoughts on it.
 

HBO Max and Discovery Plus Will Be Combined Into One Platform

By Jennifer Maas
Plus Icon
HBO Max / TLC
Discovery — which is about to become Warner Bros. Discovery within the next month, when its merger with AT&T’s WarnerMedia closes — has confirmed its plans to combine its current streaming service Discovery Plus and WarnerMedia’s HBO Max into one service, rather than offer the two platforms as a bundle.
Discovery CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels, who will also serve as CFO of the newly combined Warner Bros. Discovery, said Monday during the Deutsche Bank 30th Annual Media, Internet & Telecom Conference that Discovery is making preparations to combine the two streamers, marking the first time the company has actually revealed its post-merger strategy for Discovery Plus and HBO Max, amid speculation they could remain solo platforms with bundling options. But before they are combined, Wiedenfels says the first step during integration will be some form of bundling, while the new company figures out the best way to merge the two platforms.




“One of the most important items here is that we believe in a combined product as opposed to a bundle… We believe that the breadth and depth of this content offering is going to be a phenomenal consumer value proposition,” Wiedenfels said. “The question is, in order to get to that point and do it in a way that’s actually a great user experience for our subscribers, that’s going to take some time. Again, that’s nothing that’s going to happen in weeks — hopefully not in years, but in several months — and we will start working on an interim solution in the meantime. So right out of the gate, we’re working on getting the bundling approach ready, maybe a single sign-on, maybe ingesting content into the other product, etc., so that we can start to get some benefits early on. But the main thrust is going to be harmonizing the technology platform. Building one very, very strong combined direct-to-consumer product and platform, that’s going to take a while.”
Click here to subscribe to Variety‘s free Strictly Business newsletter covering media earnings, financial and investment news and more.
Discovery Plus currently costs $4.99 per month with ads or $6.99 without ads and accounts for the bulk of Discovery’s streaming sub total, which the company reported to be 22 million worldwide customers at the end of 2021. For HBO Max and HBO, last year ended with a combined 73.8 million global subscribers. HBO Max is priced at $9.99 per month with ads and $14.99 a month as an ad-free service. On Monday, Gunnar did not give guidance regarding how much the combined streaming platform would cost consumers, though he did note Warner Bros. Discovery will introduce both ad-free and ad-lite products.
“The direct-to-consumer business is obviously further along now than what we had four years ago,” Wiedenfels said. “There’s a greater risk, you want to get that right. Between the two direct-to-consumer products, by the time we close, close to 100 million people are going to be affected as we make those changes. So that will need some very, very detailed and disciplined planning.”



Per Wiedenfels, the $43 billion Discovery-WarnerMedia deal is still set to close early in the second quarter, following Friday’s approval vote from Discovery shareholders. Insiders tell Variety that the specific time frame being targeted is April 11-28. And once WarnerMedia is officially in Discovery’s hands, Wiedenfels looks forward to a “blowout DTC product” with the combination of HBO Max and Discovery Plus and thinks there will be “some very nice marketing synergy right out of the gate” for the Discovery and WarnerMedia brands.
“The combination could not make more sense than what we’re doing here,” Wiedenfels said. “We have HBO Max, with a more premium, male-skewing positioning, and then you’ve got the the female-positioning on the Discovery side. You’ve got the daily engagement that people enjoy with Discovery content versus sort of the event-driven nature of the HBO Max content. Take that together, I have no doubt that we will be creating one of the most complete, sort of four quadrant, old-young-male-female products out there. And I’m really excited about it. I can’t wait to see the first combined direct-to-consumer metrics because, in theory, the acquisition power of HBO Max, combined with the retention power of the Discovery content I think is going to make for a blowout DTC product, and that should certainly drive very healthy revenue growth for years to come.”
Speaking about the new company’s global outlook, Wiedenfels said “it’s important to remember that DTC internationally is going to be an exponentially better business for us than the linear world,” the area that Discovery is traditionally used to dealing in.
 
WOW!

Didn’t see this coming.

^^^^

If you into this stuff the rumors been out there for a long while

This is kinda a big deal

Sidebar....

If you have ANY IDEA

and the tiniest ability to produce any form of proof of concept?

Script, short film, podcast etc etc

Don't do it now.

Do it yesterday
 
I'm just waiting to hear/read about how DC Comics and its properties are going to be handled.
All the Business and Comic Book news I've been reading on this for the last several weeks sure doesn't look good.
 

HBO Max Has Definitely Seen Your Tweets, Is Fixing Its Apps
By Eric Vilas-Boas@e_vb_


Nearly two years ago, when HBO Max launched, it had so many problems it became a running joke. Beyond contending with two other apps emblazoned with the HBO tag, Max’s technological rollout was rushed. “It was built to get on as many devices as possible with a minimum viable feature set,” says Sarah Lyons, HBO Max’s executive vice-president of direct-to-consumer global product management. The new app had a lot more content to support and ambitions to reach far more users, but it was built off the architecture made for the existing HBO Now and HBO Go apps. Crashes, persistent slowness and freezing, and a pesky habit of forgetting Apple TV+ users’ subtitle and caption settings ran rampant, among other complaints. “It was important for us to, as quickly as possible, get off the old and get onto a new platform,” she says now, as WarnerMedia merges with Discovery and HBO Max prepares to join hands with Discovery+, and HBO Max expands internationally.


Lyons’s team has been working to update most of the existing HBO Max apps across large-screen devices by “replatforming” them, a process she described as “changing the engine of the plane while flying the plane.” The Roku app was the company’s first priority — given how many Roku owners endured crashes — followed by their TV apps on Android, PlayStation, LG, Vizio, Samsung, Vodafone, Comcast, and Cox devices. The new Apple TV+ app is rolling out in the coming days.

The outside of the new HBO Max app mostly looks the same aside from some new animation swooshes, a sound effect or two, and — on the Apple TV+ app — curation improvements to the “My Stuff” list. But the inside is more stable. The improved back end comes in part from You.i TV, a developer WarnerMedia acquired in 2020, which Lyons says gives the apps more flexibility across devices. Lyons says the company has reduced Roku crashes by up to 90 percent since replatforming. On Android devices, where it took seemingly forever just to open the app, it has cut launch time down by 50 percent. For now, the company’s focused on fixing TV-based apps, but it will eventually direct their efforts to phones and tablets as well.

“Each platform had its own intrinsic issues that we’ve been trying to attack with this,” Lyons says. She reads the tweets from annoyed HBO Max users every day, she says, and works to address the complaints she finds within them as part of these efforts. “There are little experience issues that are in and of themselves little ‘paper cuts,’ but they add up to a big issue.”
 

@playahaitian
 













 
@Camille
hysteria & ignorance...
tax write offs don't work the way they imagine

as for CNN tears... its funny how many choose to ignore that the former head of CNN was coaching Andrew Cuomo and along with Chris Cuomo and other anchors and journalists at CNN, were coordinating CNN's coverage of Cuomo

Not one lie
 
They are fucking up everything with these apps. I’m glad I got the fire stick. I’m good.
 
I'm already paying $14.99/Month for my current HBOMax subscription.
With 4K and Dolby Atmos.

I'm not about to pay $5 extra for those features.
 
Back
Top