9to5Mac reported in March that HBO Max will include Discovery Plus to its catalog after the channel joins AT&T's WarnerMedia. WarnerMedia will incorporate Discovery into HBO Max instead of offering these two services as a bundle.
And now, David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, has provided an update on this arrangement.
A New Service Will Be Replacing Both HBO Max and Discovery Plus
We got our firsthand look at this new company's content strategy in the announcement from March. Gunnar Wiedenfels, the CFO of Discovery, provided a somewhat hazy road map for the future of streaming apps, as per The Verge.
The news outlet claimed that there will be certain bundling choices available prior to the two apps combining into one mega app. The two will eventually be merged into a huge product.
"HBO Max has a competitive feature set, but it has had performance and customer issues," Zaslav said, according to a separate The Verge report. He continued by asserting that Discovery Plus has a superior tech stack and will serve as the core of the new service, which will merge HBO Max's content with Discovery Plus's content and technology.
What Warner Brothers Discovery will name the new integrated service is still unknown.
HBO Max Often Encounters Streaming Issues
As previously mentioned, Zaslav acknowledged that HBO Max has occasionally had performance concerns.
You would think HBO would have figured out how to handle the crazy rush of viewers after the service broke during multiple premieres and the finales of "Game of Thrones," "Mare of Easttown," and other shows. However, HBO Max still crashes when several users attempt to access it at once, nevertheless, in the year 2022.
According to Alex Cranz of The Verge, HBO should have fixed this technological error years ago.
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How Much Is the New Streaming Service Going To Cost?
The pricing of the new service is another question. Both Discovery and HBO Max provide an ad-free or ad-supported subscription in the U.S. With advertisements, Discovery costs $4.99 per month; without, it costs $6.99. While HBO Max costs $14.99 per month for an ad-free experience, it costs $9.99 per month with advertising.
When Will the New Streaming Service Launch?
According to The Verge, because a new service will take the place of both HBO Max and Discovery Plus, the former would be discontinued by the summer of 2023.
Is the company still supporting HBO Max?
The company decided to move the nearly finished "Batgirl" to the vault and take it off the release schedule early in the week. Additional HBO Max exclusive films vanished from the service but are still available for purchase or rental.
During the call, The Verge mentioned that Zaslav made an effort to allay those worries and stressed that HBO Max programming was, on the whole, strong and supported by the company as a whole.
