More 4 less.
Bad news, everyone: as of yesterday, your HBO Max subscription is one dollar more. If you paid$14.99 for the ad free tier, you now pay $15.99 a month. The change will be reflected in next month’s bill.
This probably shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, considering Warner Bros. Discovery CFO Gunnar Weidenfels’s recent Citibank conference, where he claimed “there’s no doubt that these products are priced way too low.”
The idea of collapsing seven windows into one and selling it at the lowest possible price doesn’t sound like a very smart strategy. And I think there was this partly capital market-fueled phase of land grabbing, and you couldn’t lose enough money and couldn’t grow subscribers fast enough. I think that’s behind us. If you look at trend lines over the past 20 or 36 months, a number of players have started gradually bringing up prices. So I think there’s a building consensus that this phase of dumping pricing is over.
Gunnar Weidenfels
And to be honest, they’re all doing this. The streaming wars have been fought over a mostly static resource, ultimately dividing what was once an unfractured whole (that being subscribers as a base). HBO Max was doing well up until the merger, even if the company itself was not. Now, there’s removed content to deal with, in addition to the price jump. So, while the increase may make logical financial sense, you can only go so far before you start to lose those subscribers. And with the merge between HBO Max and Discovery+ on the horizon, things might get a bit more pricey in the near future.
As an aside, and I knew it would be ahead of time, Velma is trash, and I have no idea why they canned Scoob 2 instead.
Source: Vulture
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