Sorry, but I just had to remark. Deadline put it this way – Warner Bros Discovery has ditched plans to turn two streaming services, HBO Max and Discovery+, into one. It will instead continue offering the latter as a stand-alone product as it moves forward with the springtime launch of a comprehensive service featuring programming from HBO Max and Discovery+.
So, whatever the new service will be, and many have rumored that it will just be called Max, it will have the best from both sides of the new company; a mixture from the Warner Bros. stable and the best that the Discovery side has to offer. However, the fans of the comparatively cheaper reality, lifestyle & nature 
programming will get to keep its own destination. But the kicker for me is, the HBO purists do not get to keep their favored content all in one undiluted service. Yeah, Zaslav has favored the D+ side of the company from Day One.
The reason to keep Discovery+ as its own entity sort of defeats the hullabaloo over the whole merger to begin with. And it also reinforces the fact that Zaslav is only thinking about one-half of this newly merged entity. The sole reason WBD left Discovery+ standing is that they surmised that Discovery+ subscribers would not spend more to watch their favored content elsewhere. The figures are known – HBO Max costs $16 a month, or $10 with ads, compared with $7 and $5 for the respective equivalents of Discovery+ programming. Why would they spend more for the same content?
But the other point of view never entered their mind. Why would HBO purists pay more money on the new service just to have it riddled with reality content that they have no interest in watching? As critics of this merger have pointed out, the HBO fan and the Discovery fan are two different animals and to try to lump them together in one place is chaos. Well, perhaps the severity of all that will now lessen.
There will going forward, always be some Discovery+ content on the new streamer, but it should not be inundated now with the complete complement of that sort of content as Max, if that’s what we are calling it, now won’t be the exclusive streaming side for Discovery stuff. One side point has always been though, that WBD has canceled & purged some content to leave more bandwidth or whatever for the D+ content coming over. It’s a shame those works won’t get to come back. But, we will take a win wherever we can get it! Hopefully, we will be spared!
2 comments
They are right. We are two different kinds of viewers in choices. I was rueing what kind of messed up mash they would make of the two! I am only interested in discovery+’s type of content…non-fiction. I was preparing myself to be dropping the service if the price was any where near HBOMax’s. I have zero interest in HBOMax! I dont find any of their content really suits what I care to watch. Keep discovery+ for us “purists”, tho I don’t know why the label is necessary, I would prefer us type referred to as “those whose preference is non-fiction content”. But maybe thats only what “over done, over the top, seriously gratuitously sexualized and violent content fiction lovers” of HBOMax can comprehend. Drop too much of discovery+ content and myself and others will likely move on to other alternative streaming for shows of our type of preference! P.S. I noticed several shows in “My List” disappeared. Not only that, several shows I would NEVER watch and would NEVER put on my list appeared! Ive gone thru and deleted them. Is that so you can say these shows are popular by viewers? Because if that’s the roundabout way to get the data to sway the meld of the two very different viewers criteria’s, nice try, but wrong. Seems even kinda fraudulent too… I have shared this with everyone I know who subscribes to discovery+ and encouraged them to check their content for unwanted and some offensive saves and also to advise others of this! If i had a saved list and kids, I would have been horrified at the unasked for “saves” to the list that they would now see on it. So, no more salting our saved lists please! We avoid the more violent things in this house usually. If we wanted to view severe violence, we would just turn on the daily news. Thank you for letting us weigh in on this! We LOVE discovery+ because in this home, we all love to learn! Yes amen to being spared! I would pay a dollar or two more a month for discovery+ before I would ever pay more for the combo!
That just goes to show that neither side is very pleased with the hot mess that WBD is dishing out. Good luck to us all.