HBO Max is almost two years old. Soon, the streaming service will add Discovery Plus to its catalog as the channel will become part of AT&T’s WarnerMedia. Instead of offering these two services as a bundle, WarnerMedia will incorporate Discovery into HBO Max.
According to Variety, Discovery CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels said 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.”
That said, before merging the two platforms, Wiedenfels believes that the first step during integration will be “some form of bundling.”
“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.”
In the US, both Discovery and HBO Max offer a subscription with or without ads. Discovery is $4.99/month with ads or $6.99/month without. HBO Max, on the other hand, is priced at $9.99/month with ads and $14.99/month for an ad-free experience. As of now, it’s unclear whether HBO Max subscribers will have to pay more to access the Discovery catalog once the merging occurs.
“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.”
Would you pay more for a combo between HBO Max and Discovery Plus, or do you think WarnerMedia should still charge the same for HBO Max but with Discovery content? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.
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