Warner Bros Discovery Abandons Plan To Shut Down Discovery+ As Stand-Alone Service As It Moves Ahead With HBO Max Merger

Warner Bros Discovery has ditched plans to turn two streaming services, HBO Max and Discovery+, into one. It will instead continue offering the latter as a stand-alone product as it moves forward with the springtime launch of a comprehensive service featuring programming from HBO Max and Discovery+.

Insiders confirmed the strategic shift with Deadline after it was initially reported by The Wall Street Journal. The WSJ cited unidentified people familiar with the decision, saying they felt Discovery+ subscribers could balk at paying a higher price for a combined service.

HBO Max costs $16 a month, or $10 with ads, compared with $7 and $5 for the respective equivalents of Discovery+. Over the past several months, WBD execs have talked often about of combining the two into a single offering. HBO Max has already been featuring Discovery titles more prominently of late, even though the ultimate fit between prestige HBO fare and Discovery mainstays like 90-Day Fiancé has been questioned both inside and outside of the company.

The plan now is to continue to have Discovery+ remain available even as a newly rebranded combo service hits the market in the spring. It is widely expected that HBO Max will be renamed Max, reflecting its broader subscriber orientation and ambitions to transcend its premium-cable roots. Pricing is one consideration, especially with consumers responding to inflation and the proliferation of streaming services in recent years. At $16, HBO Max is already at the high end of the market, having recently leapfrogged the most popular tier of Netflix in the U.S.

At the same time WBD is continuing to pursue its subscription streaming business, it is also stepping up its efforts in the free, ad-supported streaming realm. The company recently reached a deal with Roku and Tubi to license a number of shows from Warner Bros Television and HBO, and it is planning to launch FAST channels later this year.

WarnerMedia, which launched HBO Max in 2020, closed its $43 billion merger with Discovery last April. Like many media peers, it is looking to manage secular decline in the linear TV business and uncertainty around profit models in streaming. Since the close of the merger, the company has not broken out subscriber numbers for Discovery+, which launched in early 2021. Instead, it has rolled them into an overall subscriber number, including linear HBO. As of last September 30, WBD had 94.9 million direct-to-consumer subscribers and has put out a target of 130 million by 2025.