from the just-how-much-do-you-want-hbo? dept
We’ve already noted how HBO and Discovery executives maintain demonstrating the immense, pointless hurt of media megamergers. You’ll recall AT&T’s $200 billion acquisition of Time Warner and DirecTV wound up being a scorching mess, forcing AT&T to take an enormous loss and run for the exits after shedding greater than 50,000 workers.
The following spin off of Time Warner and merger with Discovery wound up being no much less silly, leading to executives which were busy shedding much more workers, killing promising reveals, and eradicating common content material from the HBO Max catalog as a result of executives on the new firm have been too cheap to pay writer and actor residuals.
Now after annoying subscribers for months and making their finish product decidedly worse, Time Warner/Discovery executives are doing the subsequent apparent factor: raising prices on HBO Max subscribers:
The price of HBO Max with out commercials will rise nearly 7% to $15.99 a month from $14.99 beginning Thursday, the streaming service’s proprietor, Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., mentioned in a press release. That makes the product barely extra expensive than Netflix Inc.’s commonplace, $15.49-a-month plan. Each corporations now supply cheaper ad-supported tiers.
The rise “will permit us to proceed to put money into offering much more culture-defining programing and bettering our buyer expertise for all customers,” the corporate mentioned.
Besides the client expertise has gotten worse. And the corporate has eliminated a parade of common content material from its lineup, making this rote justification extra hole than normal. A whole lot of billions of {dollars} have been spent in a collection of fully pointless mergers and acquisitions whose solely perform was to chop taxes and increase executives compensation and resumes.
Now firm executives are busy insisting that the low pricing within the streaming sector wants to come back to an finish after losing numerous thousands and thousands in doomed M&As for the higher a part of a number of years:
At an investor convention final week, Gunnar Wiedenfels, the chief monetary officer of Warner Bros Discovery, mentioned streaming companies “are priced means too low.”
“There was this partly capital market-fueled section of land grabbing, you couldn’t lose sufficient cash and couldn’t develop subscribers quick sufficient,” he mentioned. “I feel that’s behind us.”
The issue: you don’t actually get to make these blanket proclamations in markets which might be really aggressive. A predominant motive customers flocked from conventional cable to streaming was resulting from value. Get rid of that profit and also you wind up driving these customers both again to conventional cable, or towards piracy. At which level, these similar executives will blame everybody however themselves.
Filed Beneath: competition, hbo max, price increase, streaming
Firms: discovery, time warner, warner brothers discovery
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