STREAMING SATURDAY: Will “Max” solve all of Warner Bros Discovery’s problems?

By now you’ve heard the story. As expected, Discovery is moving ahead with their plan to add tons more reality content to HBO Max. They’ve rewritten the app and it will launch on May 23 with a new name:

The new app will have everything the old app did (or at least everything that hasn’t been stripped out) as well as a much healthier selection of reality-based, food-competing, and house-hunting content. The real question here is whether this will help the company succeed, and I think that will depend on whether Discovery can change the public’s perceptions.

Where we are now

Here’s where we are now, as I see it.

• Despite what Discovery’s David Zaslav says, there’s nothing wrong with the current app.
• The current app is organized well enough that you can find what you’re looking for easily.
• The problem isn’t the app, it’s that there isn’t as much good stuff on the app as there used to be.
• Personally, I don’t consider reality competition shows or house hunter shows “good stuff.”

So, if you look at it that way, you can see that I have pretty low expectations here. Both Discovery+ and the current HBO Max app launched with some pretty severe problems, and both have improved over time. I think HBO Max is the better app, and that’s a problem because the team that developed it have been fired. Instead, the people who developed Discovery+ are in charge of Max.

The kick in the pants for consumers

First, a little good news. If you get HBO through your cable or satellite provider, you’ll still get Max for free. If you get HBO Max through AT&T, you’ll lose it if you change plans, but for now you’ll keep it. And, at launch time, if you had the commercial-free plan with HBO Max, you’ll still keep 4K content streaming through.

A bit more good news: If you subscribe to both HBO Max and Discovery+, chances are you’ll be able to drop the Discovery+ subscription because so much of that content will migrate to Max.

At some point, though, subscribers will be asked to pay $4 more for 4K and I think this is going to completely bomb. It will price Max at $19.99 a month and that’s just plain old too much for any single app no matter what. I don’t like this trend of making people pay more for 4K and I don’t think people are going to do it.

It’s also not clear what the upgrade path will be for cable and satellite subscribers. Will they be able to pay just $4 and get the complete package? Or will they just get the 4K for free? Or will they be locked out of 4K unless they are willing to pay the full $20? I doubt anyone knows yet. One thing I can tell you is it won’t be a smooth transition.

I can’t see any path forward that makes sense

For almost 50 years, HBO has stood for quality entertainment. By removing the “HBO” from HBO Max, the folks at Discovery are making a pretty strong statement. They’re saying that they don’t care about quality. Their big announcement this week essentially boiled down to these points, which frankly lay out their disdain for quality TV:

• We’re not HBO anymore. HBO is for olds who like cable TV.
• We think that you’ll like us more if we give you more house hunting shows.
• Rather than focus on new projects, we’ll give you spinoffs of things we think you like.
• Oh, and we’ll charge you more.

I do understand that television, whether streaming or traditional, is a business. And I further realize that HBO as a business unit was losing 1.5 metric craptons of money a week. Something had to be done. However, taking the quality out of your product and charging more for it is a recipe for failure. Quality doesn’t have to be expensive. HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm succeeded in the early ’00s by using consumer-grade video cameras. It didn’t matter because the quality of the show was so good. You don’t need to spend a billion dollars on dragon CGI just to make a quality show. There are better ways of cutting costs than throwing away your reputation.

Frankly, I think the only hope for HBO at this point would be for Discovery’s David Zaslav to realize that he will never know how to make it profitable, and then spin it off quickly. I could very much see a lot of the original Turner assets — CNN, TBS, TCM — combined with HBO to form a real quality-oriented company rather than the reality-heavy mess it is becoming.

Sorry to be so down on all this

I may be the only person on the internet who isn’t cheering about this announcement. The folks at Engadget, which I sadly must say is a brand that’s suffered a similar decline since the 2000s, really love the idea. I guess I’ve had too many front row seats for this show before. Too many times when a new owner comes in and throws away the things that made the original company special. It’s way too common and I’ve seen it way too often.

Still, though, I’m pulling for you, Warner Bros. Discovery. Prove me wrong. Honestly, it would make me very happy if you did.