I assume they get "monetization" from Youtube and they don't need to worry about hosting or discovery. Probably better than doing nothing with these films.
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I assume they get "monetization" from Youtube and they don't need to worry about hosting or discovery. Probably better than doing nothing with these films.
The only 2 companies that made money during the “streaming wars” were Netflix, which had the infrastructure in place already and didn’t need to build anything from scratch, and Sony, which decided not to build any streaming service and just license all its content out. Seems WBD is following the lead of a winner.
* https://www.yahoo.com/tech/sony-succeeded-becoming-powerful-...
Is it really following the lead of a winner if you started by building your own failing streaming service, then buying another streaming service and merging them, and only then starting to license out content?
Warner Bros didn't buy out Discovery, other way around really. In return for taking on loads of debt, Discovery got ownership of WB.
HBO Max was an incredibly lean org, around 200-300 engineers at launch, 1/10th the size of its competitors but we launched a similar scaled service (tens of millions of domestic users, followed up by international launches one after another).
IMHO once COVID ended and HBO Max just became a streaming destination instead of having movies "launched" on it, they'd be just fine in terms of profit (and indeed iirc the successor Max service is profitable). First releasing big block busters doesn't drive enough user growth to pay for the movie, but if you have an existing content pipeline then having a streaming service as another delivery platform becomes reasonable.
Agreed on all counts, Discovery is the company I was referring to and Discovery+ was the 'failing' platform, not HBO Max. Though to be fair my recollection was hazy and the story around Discovery+ is not that simple given that it has stuck around post merge and is profitable according to Zaslav. I don't really trust his definition of profitable given his general love for accounting fuckery but the fact that its running is something.
As an aside, props to the team. It's been a while but I remember being pleasantly surprised after getting shuffled over from HBO GO. It's even more impressive to know it was such a small team compared to other services.