Should Warner Bros. Discovery have kept the HBO Max name? The answer to that appears to lean toward “yes,” as the entertainment giant has revealed during an earnings call that its streaming service lost 1.8 million subscribers following its rebrand to Max earlier this year. As spotted by The Verge, the company now has 95.8 million global subscribers across all of its services, down from 97.6 million at the end of the first quarter of this year. Max, which counts The Last of Us and other hit shows within its catalog, is available starting at $9.99/month.
[…] 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.