HBO Max Jacks Up Prices After Cheapskate Executives Trash Popular Shows, Refuse To Pay Artist Residuals

We've already noted how HBO and Discovery executives keep demonstrating the immense, pointless harm of media megamergers. You'll recall AT&T's $200 billion acquisition of Time Warner and DirecTV wound up being a hot mess, forcing AT&T to take a huge loss and run for the exits after laying off more than 50,000 employees.

The subsequent spin off of Time Warner and merger with Discovery wound up being no less stupid, resulting in executives that have been busy laying off even more employees, killing promising shows, and removing popular content from the HBO Max catalog because executives at the new company were too cheap to pay writer and actor residuals.

Now after annoying subscribers for months and making their end product decidedly worse, Time Warner/Discovery executives are doing the next obvious thing: raising prices on HBO Max subscribers:

The cost of HBO Max without commercials will rise almost 7% to $15.99 a month from $14.99 starting Thursday, the streaming service's owner, Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., said in a statement. That makes the product slightly more costly than Netflix Inc.'s standard, $15.49-a-month plan. Both companies now offer cheaper ad-supported tiers.

The increase will allow us to continue to invest in providing even more culture-defining programing and improving our customer experience for all users," the company said.

Except the customer experience has gotten worse. And the company has removed a parade of popular content from its lineup, making this rote justification more hollow than usual. Hundreds of billions of dollars were spent in a series of completely pointless mergers and acquisitions whose only function was to cut taxes and boost executives compensation and resumes.

Now company executives are busy insisting that the low pricing in the streaming sector needs to come to an end after wasting countless millions in doomed M&As for the better part of several years:

At an investor conference last week, Gunnar Wiedenfels, the chief financial officer of Warner Bros Discovery, said streaming services are priced way too low."

There was this partly capital market-fueled phase of land grabbing, you couldn't lose enough money and couldn't grow subscribers fast enough," he said. I think that's behind us."

The problem: you don't really get to make those blanket proclamations in markets that are actually competitive. A main reason consumers flocked from traditional cable to streaming was due to cost. Eliminate that benefit and you wind up driving those users either back to traditional cable, or toward piracy. At which point, these same executives will blame everyone but themselves.