news, fans began to speculate on social media whether more TV and film carnage was to come. However, the answer is a bit more vague than you'd expect, and comes with one big change: Warner Bros. Discovery announced that next year, HBO Max and Discovery+ would be combining into one streaming service. Here's what all of this means.Cost-cutting has seemingly been paramount since new Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav took the helm earlier this spring.
“For instance, we were going to spend $800 million promoting Discovery+, Warner was going to spend $800 million to a billion dollars promoting HBO Max. If we have one platform, we just don’t promote twice,” Zaslav said then, per. “We had in our plan to hire a lot more engineers. Now when we come together, we have thousands of engineers, another platform who has thousands of engineers, so we don’t have to hire many more thousands of engineers.
On August 4, Warner Bros. Discovery announced on a Q2 company earnings call that HBO Max and Discovery+ would be merged into one combined, singular streaming service that will launch in the United States in summer of 2023.on the call that the new streamer will capitalize on and combine the strengths of HBO Max and Disovery+: “We recognize that both of our existing products have shortcomings. HBO Max has a competitive feature set but has had performance and customer issues.
from HGTV, TLC, Food Network, Travel Channel, Magnolia Network, and Discovery Channel. With this merger, shows from HBO Max will live alongside shows from Discovery+. The new, integrated streaming service does not yet have a brand name or specific pricing details. However, Zaslav said on the call that the company is exploring the idea of a free, ad-supported tier and an ad-free paid tier for the platform., Warner Bros.