from the dealmaking-for-dealmaking’s-sake dept
The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers had been a monumental disasters. AT&T spent $200 billion to amass each firms considering it could dominate the video and web advert area. As an alternative, the corporate misplaced 9 million subscribers in 9 years, fired 50,000 staff, closed quite a few common manufacturers (together with Mad Journal), and stumbled round incompetently for a number of years earlier than giving up.
However that was simply the beginning.
After its tactical retreat, AT&T spun off Time Warner into a completely new firm, Warner Media. Warner Media then instantly rotated and introduced a blockbuster merger with Discovery, creating the creatively named Warner Brothers Discovery.
This new firm has been a blistering mess as properly. Executives there have been so low cost they’ve refused to pay residuals to creators, shuttered numerous popular programs they didn’t wish to pay for, and engaged in spherical after spherical of further layoffs to attain promised “synergies.”
All through this entire mess, executives on the new media large struggled to correctly title what that they had “created.” AT&T embraced so many alternative names for its streaming efforts, it even confused the company’s own employees. Three-plus years later and executives at Warner Brothers Discovery nonetheless can’t determine what to call the trouble, and are actually keen on killing the only brand that means anything to its users:
Warner Bros. Discovery is pushing ahead with a plan to drop “HBO” from the title of its flagship streaming service HBO Max.
That call for the long-planned rebranding of the mixed HBO Max and Discovery+ providers was partially knowledgeable by the corporate’s perception that “the HBO title turns off many potential subscribers,” Bloomberg reported on Thursday and TheWrap independently confirmed.
All through this experiment, the manager mind belief have appeared eager on degrading the standard proposition of their streaming service, removing or burying a lot of HBO’s legacy content material in menus whereas prioritizing rubbish actuality TV programming like “F-Boy Island.” On the identical time, they’ve been eager to boost charges as rapidly as doable to attain hallucinated synergies of the deal.
Years later and never solely are executives nonetheless debating what to name this scorching mess, they proceed to point they haven’t any understanding of constant branding, or that the HBO model usually represented high quality in a sea of homogenous crap.
All advised, this collection of pointless mergers solely actually illustrates the media business’s senseless “progress for progress’s sake” mindset, by which multi-billion-dollar offers are made for no different motive than to scale back taxes, enhance govt compensation, and delude rich media executives into believing they’re savvy deal makers. All whereas staff and prospects alike get the very quick finish of the stick, and the top product winds up being decidedly worse than when these purportedly savvy dealmakers began.
Filed Below: competition, media, media consolidation, megadeals, mergers, streaming, tv, video
Corporations: at&t, discovery, hbo, warner bros., warner bros. discovery
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