When HBO Max launched in late May, I used to be excited regardless of all of the branding confusion across the service.
Whereas HBO centered on a small variety of intellectual reveals and flicks, HBO Max presents many extra motion pictures and reveals from WarnerMedia and past. It has the potential to be a real rival to Netflix, with a broad catalog that’s price retaining year-round as an alternative of simply every time the very best HBO reveals arrive.
Now that HBO Max is right here, I can see the fact: HBO Max is a greater worth than HBO was, however its catalog continues to be dwarfed by Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. That most likely received’t change anytime quickly, as father or mother firm AT&T continues to unfold its content material catalog throughout a number of streaming companies as an alternative of investing in only one. AT&T has claimed to be ”all in” on HBO Max, however as with so most of the firm’s different streaming video endeavors, this one looks like one other half measure.
Revolving doorways
These charts assist clarify why HBO Max’s choice feels a bit hole, however it’s not the one clarification.
As Joshua Rivera wrote for The Verge after HBO Max’s launch, the catalog is filled with inconsistencies. While a number of DC Extended Universe motion pictures are current, Birds of Prey and Man of Steel aren’t, and traditional DC-based reveals like Smallville and Lois and Clark are lacking as effectively. There are some traditional Adult Swim cartoons, together with Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, however not others, comparable to The Brak Show and Harvey Birdman. Most of Peter Jackson’s Middle-Earth movies can be found, however not The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. As Rivera notes, the inconsistencies make HBO Max really feel like much less of a identified amount.
Part of the issue is that AT&T continues to be attempting to juggle different streaming companies on the similar time. It operates Crunchyroll for anime, DC Universe for superhero content material, and Boomerang for cartoons, and whereas HBO Max presents picks from these content material siloes, AT&T is treating their full catalogs as upsells.
HBO Max isn’t even hanging onto a few of its most defining content material. A lot of DC Universe movies will depart the service on July 1, together with Justice League, Wonder Woman, LEGO Batman, and the Burton-Schumacher Batman movies from the late 80s and 90s. Instead of getting a steady assortment of DC movies on the service, WarnerMedia says the plan is to have “a collection of DC films that will rotate on the platform.”
Granted, content material licensing isn’t all the time easy. Movies or reveals that may appear to belong to at least one media firm or studio may truly be wrapped up in distribution offers with one other.
But we’ve seen how Disney moved mountains to get the unique Star Wars motion pictures rights from Turner, permitting Disney+ to host them on day one. Disney additionally took the daring step of bringing FX authentic sequence to Hulu at no further cost a couple of months in the past, making FX’s cable channel much less priceless within the course of. It’s onerous to shake the sensation that AT&T simply isn’t attempting onerous sufficient.
In search of intestinal fortitude
This sample has performed out with AT&T again and again within the cord-cutting period. The firm rapidly grew DirecTV Now as a compelling cable various, then simply as rapidly made it unappealing via extreme worth hikes and channel cuts. It supplied a small, low-cost bundle of cable channels with AT&T Watch TV—at one level making it free with sure AT&T wi-fi plans—however by no means obtained round to including Roku help and has now stopped selling the service fully. It constructed an intriguing gateway to cord-cutting with the AT&T TV service and set-top field, solely to saddle it with long-term contracts and built-in worth hikes.
With HBO Max, historical past is repeating itself, as AT&T undermines the service with a comparatively small, inconsistent, and ever-shifting catalog. If AT&T actually thinks HBO Max is the way forward for its TV enterprise, the corporate may do much more to indicate it.
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