HBO Max was renamed Max, and Warner Bros. Discovery lost subscribers::Warner Bros. Discovery lost 1.8 million subscribers in the second quarter of 2023 following HBO Max’s rebrand to Max. The company now has 95.8 million subscribers across all of its services.
y’arr
How about they fix the fucking max app. I don’t care about the rebrand and what ever else blah blah blah. Just fix the fucking app. It’s shit on all 3 of my tvs, constantly buffering, freezing, jumping back several minutes and repeating etc etc. It’s not my connection, every other streaming service works as intended with no issues on all of my tvs.
They also didn’t have to make me download a new app, they could have updated the assets from HBOMax. Now I have to create a Samsung account to download it on my TV
Everyone of these counts, thought, you know what, we will just make our own streaming platform, how hard could it be?
now they probably realized that it’s hard, wonder how long before shit like HBO Max, Peacock, Whatever the one with with Star Trek is. How long before they just go back and license out their shit to a competent company, like they should, ideally more than one.
I used to have problems with the HBO max app all the time and would have to delete it and redownload it. Probably fucked on a tv though.
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.
It’s just like spending, what was it, 44 billion dollars or something like that to own Twitter, and not even a year later you drop the brand and rename it X. Like, dude, any decent programmer or sysadmin could spin up a copy of Twitter in a few days of work. You paid $44 billion for the brand.
44 billion for the brand, but more importantly the user base. Although let’s not discount the tech behind the scenes. Any decent programmer or sysadmin might be able to spin up a copy of Twitter in a few days. But it’s not going to scale to the size Twitter is, and have all the moderation and legal tools Twitter does (although Elon is gutting those by the day), integrate into as many places as Twitter does, have the app infrastructure Twitter does, etc.
But regardless, all those things are irrelevant without people actually using the service. No clone is going to have the user base, and even with the rebrand to X, Elon still has a lot of users. Not as many as when he started, but still a lot. That’s what the 44 billion bought.
I imagine executive meetings with people rambling about (an already well established) brand cannibalizing (what could become, if everything goes perfectly, an equally or even more recognized) brand. Basically, throwing away what you have for what you could have in the future.
Got rid of omniverse but gained myth busters
I started a discovery plus account because I wanted to watch Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs again, after all these years. Then immediately after, the merger happened and they came to max (without commercials like on my discovery trial), so I immediately canceled discovery plus.
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.
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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.
