I haven't been following that sort of thing, can you give me some details about this? I thought that streaming services for reoccurring subscription income was all the push nowadays.
It's ....
complicated.
When HBO Max debuted, it was owned by AT&T. And in that milieu, there were two things that made it really awesome-
1. AT&T was willing to shovel money into it.
2. Wall Street cared more about growth in subscribers than it did about, um, "making money."
Combine those two things and you had a brief amazing period at HBO Max (and the WB studio). We also saw other streamers paying insane amounts to generate content. Content is king after all, and all of them want to be Netflix and Disney+, not Peacock.
However, the spinoff of WB/HBO did a few things which are coming into focus-
A. You no longer had a giant, somewhat disinterested, telecom company as the deep pockets.
B. The mechanics of the transition to Discovery/HBO saddled the new entity with pretty massive debt.
C. The Discovery people took over.
What we are seeing is David Zaslav (head of WB Discovery) is doing what he does best from the Discovery side- cutting costs. This has taken many forms. First is the use of certain tax breaks that are only available after this type of merger, and that require writing off assets (this is the "Batgirl" fiasco). Next is the "disappearing" of shows- shows that HBO has the right to stream are just disappearing, because those shows have residual rights and they have to pay the talent to continue to maintain them on the service. After that is the re-thinking of profitability; in essence, they are de-valuing the streaming and owning the rights to content and placing a premium on showing movies in theaters with a restricted window and shopping programs to other streamers instead of keeping them in-house. Finally, they are trying to boost the use of lower-cost shows over programming that has higher costs (Discovery-type reality programming instead of HBO dramatic shows).
Now, in my opinion, this could have very deleterious effects in the long term as streaming shakes out. If, however, this is a ploy to get the balance sheet looking good before it is sold ... well, maybe it makes sense?
But if you're a fan of quality HBO programming ... or a fan of the great DC programming they have been doing on HBO Max, this really sucks. A lot.
thedirect.com
