AT&T's WarnerMedia is aiming to balance out HBO Max's male-leaning audience through its impending merger with Discovery.
WarnerMedia's merger with Discovery was announced in 2021 and will be finalized sometime in 2022, with the new media company existing under the name Warner Bros. Discovery. Following the merger of their respective parent companies, both HBO Max and Discovery+ will combine into one streaming service as well. As reported by Collider, Discovery CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels, who will serve as CFO for the new Warner Bros. Discovery, stated during the Deutsche Bank 30th Annual Media, Internet & Telecom Conference that the combination of Disovery+'s female-leaning audience with HBO Max's male-leaning audience will create "one of the most complete" streaming services available.
"The combination could not make more sense than what we're doing here," said Wiedenfels. "We have HBO Max, with a more premium, male-skewing positioning, and then you've got the female-positioning on the Discovery side. You've got the daily engagement that people enjoy with Discovery content versus sort of the event-driven nature of the HBO Max content. Take that together, I have no doubt that we will be creating one of the most complete, sort of four quadrant, old-young-male-female products out there."
As of August 2019, Neilsen reported that Discovery, Inc. was the most-watched media company for female viewers across all television in the United States, with Discovery networks being the most-watched for women ages 25-54. Discovery includes programming like The Food Network, HGTV, The History Channel, Animal Planet, Investigation Discovery and more. HBO Max offers all of HBO, DC films and shows, Studio Ghibli films and much more.
Days after the deal between WarnerMedia and Discovery was announced, Discovery CEO David Zaslav revealed that the deal initially came together as a way to combat another rival company and its streaming service, Disney+. "With Disney accelerating at that point because of COVID, I just looked at that and thought who could take that on? Who could be a global offering that formidable?" Zaslav said in May 2021. "When you put us together -- Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Game of Thrones, Sex and the City, HBO and Discovery being everywhere in the world with local content -- we're better together."
Per Wiedenfels, while the long-term plan is to combine HBO Max and Discovery+ into a single streamer, this won't be an immediate change and Warner Bros. Discovery plans to offer a short-term bundle of the two services in the interim. "One of the most important items here is that we believe in a combined product as opposed to a bundle… Again, that's nothing that's going to happen in weeks -- hopefully not in years, but in several months -- and we will start working on an interim solution in the meantime," the CFO said.
"So right out of the gate, we're working on getting the bundling approach ready, maybe a single sign-on, maybe ingesting content into the other product, etc., so that we can start to get some benefits early on," Wiedenfels continued. "But the main thrust is going to be harmonizing the technology platform. Building one very, very strong combined direct-to-consumer product and platform, that's going to take a while.”
Source: Collider, Discovery, Inc.