The fall from grace of Warner and HBO Max is something worthy of study: The cancellation of ‘Batgirl’ was only the beginning of a spiral of bad decisions with the sole objective of financially saving the company. It must be admitted that with films like ‘Don’t worry, my dear’ he has had bad luck (or good luck, we’ll see how the box office performs), but in other matters they have been looking for the debacle.
We give it away, we give it away, hey
It is now Gunnar Wiedenfels, the CFO of the company (the CFO, to understand us) has stated that both HBO Max and Discovery+ are “fundamentally undervalued”. Put another way: As soon as the two services merge in the middle of next year in the United States, it will increase the cost of it more than we expect.
Wiedenfels believes that the quality of the content on both platforms makes them have a big gap to be able to increase the price of the serviceand, in fact, they believe that the combination of the prestige series on HBO with the lighter reality shows on Discovery will stop losing customers along the way. The clients themselves have not asked us, of course: so much price increase in streaming in the end has all the earmarks of exploding sooner or later.
In any case, it seems that the strategy of HBO Max and Discovery + is going to go the other way: Wiedenfels believes that increasing your subscriber base is part of the “old streaming” and that the “new streaming” is to have fewer subscribers, but of quality. Or, put another way, that they are willing to jump through hoops every time prices go up.