HBO Max Boss: ‘We’re Way Underpriced’ and ‘We Replaced the NBA With a Lot of Good Stuff’
Do you feel like you’re getting a bargain when you pay $16.99/month to get HBO Max without ads? Well, David Zaslav has some bad news for you. The Warner Bros. Discovery CEO said today the service is “way underpriced.”
Translation: he can’t wait to raise the price, but he’s trying to suck in more subscribers first.
$18.49/mo.
Speaking today at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference, Zaslav said, “This is quality and that’s true across our company – motion picture, TV production, and streaming. Quality. We think that gives us a chance to raise price. We think we’re way underpriced. We’re going to take our time because we’re really growing now. And people are spending more and more time with us. But we think that there’s real upside to that. And it’s hard to replace quality content that people love.”
Zaslav’s rationale for these price hikes? He thinks you’re getting too much content for too little money.
“Consumers in America were paying twice as much 10 years ago for content. People were spending, on average, $55 for content 10 years ago,” Zaslav said. “And the quality of the amount of content they’re getting (now), the spend is up like 10- or 12-fold. So they’re paying dramatically less. I think it’s we want a good deal for consumers. But I think over time there’s real opportunity, particularly for us in that quality area, to raise price.”
Password Crackdown When?
HBO Max is also taking it easy on account sharing, despite recent signals they’ll be cracking down. “We haven’t been pushing on the password sharing and the economics yet. People are really starting to love HBO Max. That’s the key. We want them to fall in love with our content, with our series, with the differentiated offering outside the U.S., and then over time… we’re going to begin to push on that.”
No NBA, No Problem
Despite losing the NBA to Amazon and NBCUniversal, Zaslav isn’t sweating the future for his brands like TNT and TBS. “Sports is super strong and it’s pretty strong globally, particularly in the U.S. And we’ve taken on a lot more sport. We did that because we were able to get it for a good price. We walked away from the NBA and we were able to replace it with a lot of good stuff. We recently picked up one of the semifinals of college football playoffs, but things like March Madness and the Big 12. And so we’re doing quite well.”
Fact check: they did not replace the NBA with “a lot of good stuff.” You cannot replace a major sports league with a handful of college games and try to include a sport you already owned (NCAA playoff basketball) as a “replacement.”
$18.49/mo.
Zaz Got ‘Tude
One of our favorite things about David Zaslav is his utter lack of self-awareness. He’s like a clumsy waiter who slams into your table, knocking your margarita in your lap and says, “You’re wet,” as if it’s your fault.
When Zaslav makes decisions, they’re almost uniformly boneheaded. (This is the man who killed CNN+ and here we are a few years later awaiting the launch of what is basically CNN+ 2.0.) When he gets out of the way of legitimately talented people like HBO CEO Casey Bloys, things go well.
As he described the content on HBO Max, Zaslav said, “You know, we’re not trying to be everything to everybody.”
This runs completely contrary to what he said in a long-winded 2023 presentation, when Zaslav said he would transform HBO Max into “the place every member of the household can go to see exactly what they want at any given time.”
This is just him admitting he can’t program for kids – they’ve dumped nearly every children’s show from HBO Max. He can’t decide what he wants to name the service – he inherited HBO Max, renamed it Max, then renamed it HBO Max again. No one likes the dumb reality shows he brought over from his days at Discovery, so they removed them from HBO Max and they’re spinning off all Zaslav’s old channels to a new company saddled with debt that will surely die a slow death.
And every time he speaks of Harry Potter, Zaslav gets wildly exhuberant, as if reusing the same costumes, sets, and in one case the exact same actor as the movies is a masterstroke of genius.
Zaslav also once again threw shade at streaming providers who offer less expensive subscriptions. “Not only (are) there too many players, but in order to stay alive, a lot of the players have just decided to drop price aggressively,” Zaslav said.
$18.49/mo.
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