WarnerMedia launching HBO Max Spring 2020

I hear that HBO Max is in conversations for both Big Bang and 2.5 Men, with the package possibly fetching as much as $1.5 billion.

Part of the reason why the price tag is so high is because, unlike Friends and The Office, which have been drawing millions of old and new viewers on Netflix, Big Bang and 2.5 Men have never been exposed to streaming beyond a few “stacked” recent episodes of Big Bang on CBS All Access over the last several seasons. WBTV similarly held back Friends until scoring the big deal with Netflix in 2014 [HBO MAX's recent deal for Friends cost them a cool $425 million].

I hear talks are complex, in large part because of stipulations in co-creator/executive producer Lorre’s deal with WBTV, but I hear WarnerMedia is determined to have WBTV’s biggest comedy series of the last two decades, Friends, The Big Bang and 2.5 Men, on HBO Max at launch in spring 2020.




da fuq

behind a paywall but the article says:
HBO Max, due out in April, will need at least 15 million subscribers to break even on the cost of programming for the platform, the firm estimated. Content for the service is expected to total more than $2 billion per year, according to the report. HBO Max, AT&T’s answer to Netflix, will need to scale faster than its niche predecessor HBO Now to break even and appease investors, Barclays analysts say.

AT&T said HBO Max will launch with 10,000 hours of content, which is about three times the amount currently on HBO’s subscription-streaming outpost, HBO Now, analysts at Barclays wrote in an Oct. 22 report. The analysts estimate that HBO Max will need to attract between 15 million and 20 million new subscribers to break even on the cost of that content (not including cannibalization).
Barclays estimates that AT&T will spend more than $2 billion per year on content for HBO Max

The streaming-video service, due out in April, will be an amped up version of premium-TV network HBO, with the same programming, plus new originals; movies and shows from other WarnerMedia properties like Warner Bros. and the Turner-branded channels; and classic TV repeats like “Friends” and “The Big Bang Theory.”
But most analysts are expecting Disney Plus to make a much bigger splash than HBO Max. Disney Plus will cost less — at around $7 per month — than the $15 or more dollars HBO Max is expected to cost. (AT&T has not announced the price of HBO Max.) The Barclays analysts are skeptical that HBO Max will match the audience of Hulu and other services before it.
HBO Now is estimated to have 10 million subscribers after launching in 2015. And it took Hulu eight years to reach that subscriber milestone, the report says. Streaming video is more popular now than when those services launched, so HBO Max may be able to grow faster when it’s released in 2020 than either of those services did.




They are apparently going to spend $500-600m for South Park streaming rights (1 year? 2 years? dunno) too, thats nuts

this whole streaming thing is building up to a glorious disaster

Netflix currently has 60m US subs and another 100m or so international (they pay less)
Hulu currently has 28m subs (!) but a TON of those paid $12 for a year of hulu last holiday
Amazon Prime currently has over 100m subs but a lot of those are just in for the free shipping/etc

Disney+, Apple TV, HBO Max are all launching soon and then we got stuff like CBS Access, Showtime, Epix, NBC Universal soon, and god knows what other garbage is coming up.