Renaming HBO Max to just Max sounded strange at first, and now information has surfaced online about how Warner is bleeding subscribers with the name change in the US. Last quarter the service lost nearly two million subscribers, going from 98 million to 96 million paid customers. This happened in connection with the name change to "Max", but Warner themselves are not worried, but believe that many customers deliberately subscribed for a few months to watch primarily The Last of Us and then cancel their subscription afterwards. Whether this is true or not, we will of course know at the end of next month, when the next quarterly report arrives.
At the same time, Warner announced that the turnover and profit for the second quarter went up compared to the first quarter, which of course makes the loss of paying customers less painful for the media giant. Tech site The Verge writes the following about it all:
"Despite this, the executives at Warner Bros. Discovery don't seem too worried. During an earnings call, the company's chief financial officer, Gunnar Wiedenfels, attributed the downward trend to "overlapping subscriber bases between Max and Discovery Plus" as well as "expected churn" following the end of The Last of Us season 1 and the series finale of Succession. CEO David Zaslav had something similar to say, noting that "while we have seen some expected subscriber disruption, we have experienced lower than expected churn throughout this process" — a process that involved asking HBO Max subscribers to download a new Max app to their devices in order to continue using the service. Zaslav also said that the company still expects its streaming business in the US to become profitable this year."