Max Adds More Ads, Takes Aim As Password Sharing
We've documented in detail how the whole AT&T->Time Warner->Warner Brothers Discovery merger processhas been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku byover-compensated executivesclearlyout of their depths.
After paying a premium for the HBO brand just to deprecate it, steadily eroding the quality of their streaming catalog (how many reality TV shows can there be involving people having sex on an island?), firing countless employees, cancelling popular shows, raising prices, and implementing all kinds of new restrictions, Warner Brothers Discovery is unsurprisingly starting to lose subscribers.
Having learned absolutely nothing from history or experience (preposterously outsized executive compensation ensures there's simply no financial incentive to), the company has since proceeded to make more of these same sort of decisions, including recently making John Oliver harder for fans to watch.
But they're not done yet; the company (HBO) once known for artistic quality also says it's on the cusp of following Netflix's dubious crackdown on the public menace that is password sharing, and is expanding the type and volume of ads paying users get to enjoy:
On the network side, HBO is known as a channel with very few commercials and a primary focus on its own content. Now that WBD is focusing on driving the streaming side of HBO through the Max app, it would prefer that the content be more synonymous with ads."
Of course, the whole streaming industry is heading this direction: more restrictions, higher prices, shittier product catalogs, lots of pointless, layoff-producing mergers, and more ads. And they're heading this direction because as publicly traded companies, it's simply not good enough to provide people with a quality, popular product at an affordable price.
The need for improved quarterly returns at any cost sooner or later begins a process of brand quality cannibalization that eventually winds up driving users to the exits (and back to piracy). At which point executives inevitably blame absolutely everything (VPNs! China! Piracy! Regulators! Youth!) for their own reckless pursuit of impossible, unsustainable scale. Just like Cable TV did.
At that point the cycle begins anew, with a fresh set of pesky innovative upstarts developing services that excite customers, until they too succumb to Wall Street's impossible thirst for unlimited growth.