Technology

In all seriousness, why the hell would a company already branded the "Home Box Office" run away from the moniker in the era of at-home online movie binging. You have some of the most intuitive psychic real estate shy of Twitter, a company whose name will never be changed because the brand recognition is so high. Who could have possibly gotten you to believe changing it to something as vague and ill-suited as Max was a good idea?

I had HBO in some form for 20 years, the many things they did to destroy HBO's dna in the name of short term profit ended that loyalty.

They shelved projects people worked on, that is their professional reputation, for a tax break.

They cancelled series that legions of fans were invested in.

The CEO even crowed about how great it will be to start generating cheap to produce "reality" show garbage instead of quality content.

Insatiable, capitalistic greed just turns whatever it touches to shit. A race to the bottom.

I don't get why they made Max a completely different app. I mean I also don't get dropping the hbo monicker, but why did I have to get a brand new app instead of them just reskining hbo max

Kinda like rebranding Twitter into X

HBO = my brain thinks Game of Thrones, Sopranos, The Last of Us, Band of Brothers, Chernobyl. Literally decades and decades of quality premium content.

MAX = porn. My brain immediately associates the name with porn. Idk why.

I swear that companies are really misunderstanding how most people interact with brands, or I am. But given recent events, I think it's the companies. On another topic, for reasons I cannot fathom, Schwans home frozen food delivery is re-branding from Schwans' (which is hard for me to spell, but easy to say) that it's been since the 1950s and is widely understood and recognized. What are they re-branding to? It sounds like they got right up to date with mid 90s Internet company branding, going with Yelloh! (I think). No one wants to say Yelloh!. It looks stupid, and somehow more out of fashion than their old logo.

We've got whatever the heck is going on with Twitter/X, we've got this (Yea, no one recognizes HBO, that's OLD./s) The Great Courses Plus renamed Wondrium (which is again, giving up a rather well known brand in some niches with an obvious idea that it's slightly different as a subscription). At least this doesn't entirely sound / look stupid, and they added content when doing it, but still.

I probably could go on, but just... why? IDK - have you ever looked at an existing brand and thought - oh, that's too dated? Usually companies pull this stuff to "trick" people into thinking it's a different company, like when Blackwater became whatever, or Jeep etc became Stellantis. Such self owns.

It's pretty ironic how companies will spend so much money on advertising to gain brand recognition, but then throw it away on a whim.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

During an earnings call, the company’s chief financial officer, Gunnar Wiedenfels, attributed the downward trend to “overlapping subscriber bases between Max and Discovery Plus” as well as “expected churn” following the end of The Last of Us season 1 and the series finale of Succession.

CEO David Zaslav had something similar to say, noting that “while we have seen some expected subscriber disruption, we have experienced lower than expected churn throughout this process” — a process that involved asking HBO Max subscribers to download a new Max app to their devices in order to continue using the service.

Zaslav has previously hinted at incorporating news and sports into Max, and rumors suggest that it could add live CNN broadcasts to the platform.

As Hollywood producers as well as writers and actors butt heads over the use of AI and streaming residuals, Zaslav said it’s “important” that the strike gets settled soon.

“We’re hopeful that all sides will get back to the negotiating rooms so that the strikes get resolved in a way that the writers and actors feel they are fairly compensated and their efforts and contributions are fully valued.”

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and Writers Guild of America are set to have their first meeting since the strike began on Friday.

I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I agree that these changes have all been incredibly stupid and devalue one of the few remaining producers of quality TV (HBO), but I think that this is missing the point. The key is this:

Notably, the loss in subscribers didn’t seem to affect streaming revenue. It grew to $2.73 billion this quarter, marking a 13 percent increase.

In other words, fill up the service with cheap / easy to produce reality crap and hike up prices over time. Revenue goes up and costs go way down. People drift away but you keep growing the bottom line, at least for now. The shareholders rejoice and the consumers lose.

The quality of the entire thing went down sharply too.

I want to pay for max so I can watch warrior season 3 and let their BS algorithm know there's interest in it and not cancel it outright. They don't even allow subscribers from my country UK so I have no choice but to pirate. They also have not released the season 2 bluray yet and I'm not gonna get the season 1 one if I'm just gonna end up with an incomplete collection cause this company is just allergic to taking my money.

Bad Faith podcast had an episode on the strike a couple weeks back. The guests (strikers) talked about how Zaslav renaming HBO to Max is right inline with their intent to churn out "good enough" content to increase profits rather than increase quality. They likened it to a signal to Wall Street to improve their share value.

You literally cannot change the fucking size of the subtitles anymore, at least on Android or Chromecast. So you're stuck with giant letters, black background. It's the most infuriating shit of all time, HBO Max had options to change these things, I can't believe that 1 programmer couldn't solve this in a single day.

I was a subscriber and there was no smooth move over to max. I had to keep resetting my password every time I logged in and then eventually couldn’t get into either site even moments after a reset. Eventually said fuck it and cancelled.

If it’s anything more than barely inconvenient to use your service I’ll spend my money elsewhere

Keep that stock price at 12 bucks.

y'arr

Now they should cut more letters and just make it x. That's called branding efficiency.

LOL you can't even have a conversation with this name.

"Oh I've been watching this awesome new show, it's so good."

"oh yeah, where can I watch it?"

"max"

"...???..."

"it's on max"

"what? max what?"

"it's the old hbo, it's just max now though"

"hbo renamed themselves to max?"

"no ... but .... "

"okay nevermind"

Disney runs multiple brands. They ran family friendly films mostly under Disney and pg-13 type content under another (more complicated now after their buying spree).

Discovery absolutely should have done something similar. Show films intended for mature audiences under HBO. Run family friendly content under Discovery. Make them both under the same umbrella (HBO Discovery, perhaps). Create subscriptions for one or the other or both from the same app. But don’t throw away the HBO brand!

What happened to Cinemax?

Also half of these apps have the exact same UX, whats going on here?