To make the flagship streamer look more “family friendly”: Warner Bros. Discovery executives ultimately felt that the HBO name was somehow restricting HBO Max’s uptake among households with children. “We all love HBO, and it’s a brand that has been built over five decades” to stand for “edgy, groundbreaking entertainment for adults,” WBD head of streaming JB Perrette said at the Max launch event in April. “But it’s not exactly where parents would most eagerly drop off their kids… Not surprisingly, the [kids’ content] category has not met his true potential on HBO Max.” The new Max includes a placeholder kids’ profile (which by default allows access only to content with PG and TV-PG ratings or lower) on the start screen for all new subscribers.
I think now there's more an awareness ,and the internet access makes things a little different, of who owns what in the television world. The streaming world has kind of forced that a little more, but it's not like everyone knows that Cartoon Network is owned by some other company and that HBO Max was the streaming service with the shows from that network on there. There are casual people who just wanted to find something for their kids to watch and not wanting to use a whole flow chart to find out who owns what and where is what. I can also see that being for the other reason cited from that article, why they changed the name to Max.
Anyway, the thinking was that the new Max name was needed to reflect that it’s a place where you can watch not only, say, “Euphoria” and “Barry” but also stuff like “90 Day Fiancé,” Jonathan and Drew Scott’s “Property Brothers” and Shark Week episodes.There is a sense that the average person and people who favor things like "House Hunters" and whatever the heck Food Network is doing, wouldn't think of a service named HBO anything to have their shows on it. And surely having "90 Day Fiancé" on such a named service might make the HBO brand feel weaker, same with "Friends".
Things have gone wild in the past two years as the Warner Bros. Discovery Corporation thing has been kind of a messy marriage that feels like this isn't peanut butter and chocolate but peanut butter and sardines. (shoutout the guy who probably likes that, you have an interesting taste ) Cartoon Network on Max has taken a long beating along with a lot of trying for the family programming. Don't ask an animation fan how they feel about the CEO of this company, they will make you think he's 2nd to a famous mustached bad man. So why are they going back to the old name?
Some will say the company is run by "dumb" people. This merger is kind of messy, and I kind of think a lot of that is Warner might be just somewhat destined to be a bad spot, the AOL Time Warner combo was a well know failure and maybe everything comes up that Warner might be something that is very hard to own, and probably maybe cursed. (purely silly speculation) The other thing is mistakes aren't bad, they are things to learn from and they learned something there somewhere. They seemed to realize that they can't have a Netflix because Netflix is something else all together. They have a strong brand with HBO so focus on that and a few other things. It seems anything really really related to Discovery's unscripted networks might be more suited to the still living Discovery+ .
All of this is silly, because well things all seem silly. There is something this shows that I don't think gets talked about much in this "streaming era" of the media world . It kind of feels forgotten. So humor me here as I explain something.
Netflix is a strong brand, it's also not a streaming service name, at the first, it was the name of service that was competing against video rental things when that was a thing. This would actually make me think of something else that would be a good topic to talk about, but staying on track here. Netflix's name is from the earlier internet when "net" was a strong standard term. Like Netscape. It took it's business and became a streaming service. Netflix's brand is known for being a bunch of things because it's broad streamer. At one time, it was the streamer that other companies sold the rights to repeat their stuff on before deciding to stake their own claims. So unique that I won't be talking more about them here.
Hulu, was started as a streaming service and not as anything else, has the best name, in my view, it's simple, stands out and strong. It's been around the longest, because those guys up in the last paragraph. They were once the fun idea of different companies getting together before unity fell apart much like society. Hulu can really do anything because it's name is a brand connected to it and not something else. Like top tier name, well done, and I'm not really going to be talking more about them here.
I'm going to totally leave out Amazon Prime streaming because it's a totally different thing and world, it's a streaming service connected to a shopping experience where you pay to get some things a little faster and for free shipping. Leaving out Apple TV+ because that is also something different and not really what I am talking about in this post.
The whole HBO thing is interesting because HBO made a name for itself with the programming it ended up doing. Original HBO is different to what it became in 1980's and even more so after it's big peak era. It was made in the world of cable, and the one thing about cable channels is they had branding. Different branding. Let's talking about just Warner Bros. Discovery's current channels. Discovery Channel, turns 40 this year, it launched on June 17, 1985. People now associate it as a channel that airs , male-leaning, reality shows with shows about people being naked in odd locations, racing street rods, making moonshine, fishing, the state of Alaska, etc. That's not what the channel started as either, it's name was literal the idea of educational programming that viewers would be making a discovery. It's sister channels range from HGTV a channel where the G once meant they aired gardening shows, Food Network, Turner Classic Movies, Cartoon Network, which has a sub sister network on the same feed known as Adult Swim, and more. They are channels with different focus, demographics, brandings, feels, programming. That's what cable television was. It also wasn't mentioned much that channels were sister channels. No one really had to know.
The streaming era is the concept of having to take all these different, in many cases, very strong brands and pushing them aside and trying to have their programming (saying content will make me gag) on one service. In this case, two. Discovery+ made sense for the channels owned pre-2022 Discovery as even though Food Network and Travel Channel are totally different in programming, they both are owned by Discovery and both do unscripted programming. (HBO) Max is a hard name to reconcile so many different things. Ted Turner, who is the base line of the channels owned by Warner pre-2022 merger, with exception to HBO , Tru TV, and kind of Boomerang, all their channels were created by Ted Turner himself. 3 of them bare his name TBS, TNT, and TCM. Ted Turner's brand was himself. He also created CNN and Cartoon Network. CNN is the the strongest cable news network name because that's literally the name. Cartoon Network is like Food Network and like the CNN , it's what the name on the label is a network for cartoons. These networks made names for themselves in the cable world, and in the streaming ideal concept homogenization are only being used to be part of something instead of being seen as their own strengths.
It would be probably impossible to convert every single channel into a streaming service, which is why things have been done the boring corporate way instead. It means the viewer has to do more work than what television actually is, they have to figure who owns what then go the service owned by that and then hope that service has that what they are looking for. That wasn't the cable way because channels would air stuff they didn't even own, and still do now. The network Hallmark Channel is owned by Hallmark, airs shows like the Golden Girls, owned by Disney, because they paid the money to run the reruns. To find such a show on streaming, you go to Disney owned streamers of Disney+ and Hulu. It might be cleaner, but television shouldn't require a person to know who owns what to go to what.
Paramount+ is not the best name, it was once CBS All Access. CBS All Access wasn't a good name either, except for the CBS part, but the idea was that it was a service where CBS viewers could all access stuff from CBS itself. Viacom then remerges with CBS and decides that Paramount Plus was a better name. It decides to subsume a network name that's been around 1927, as a secondary branding to a movie and TV studio. Eventually, Viacom decided to rebrand their entire company as Paramount. If Warner had gone with Warner Plus , Comcast had chosen Universal Plus, these would be kind of terrible names. Yes, all these studios have something someone might remember about them, but these brands aren't end all be all.
Sticking with Paramount, the company, they own not just CBS, but Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, to stick with a basic three here. MTV is a big well known name, Comedy Central is well known, Nickelodeon is the most well known children's brand. But in the streaming world they are sub brands on something with a boring name. Their commercials have to explain they have SpongeBob on Paramount+ because it's home of Nickelodeon is so well-known and the average person wasn't going around thinking about ownerships and corporation games. A Nickelodeon branded streaming service would be more well known for fans of that network. This isn't the case to be made that we need multiple streaming services for every single thing, but my point is that there were long established brands that were well known and the streaming world has the hard time of trying to make that work under one thing.
It's also of note that these streaming services that were owned by legacy media , so not Netflix, were tying to take the brands and programming they own and tried to make catch all everything is one thing services. Cable networks never really ran that way. In the former Viacom world CMT and Nickelodeon are co-owned but they were made to serve totally different audiences. Even when the company would have its channels share some shows, they still be targeting different audiences.
The thing I wonder about the HBO Max affair here is that the company also says they realize that they can't be Netflix and that also means they can' t be as broad as them. This also means they can't be as wide ranging and strange like their cable network offerings. Can Paramount Plus be that strange and broad either? They have a different case, their premium network - Showtime- was put inside Paramount Plus, but it's not as strong as the HBO thing and it seems to be slipping aside. The strongest programming on Paramount Plus are from CBS and Nickelodeon, and some few original for the streaming service programming. There could be and , maybe already is starting, where streaming services owned by legacy media companies, only work to certain demos and niches, and they actually abandon niches and groups they went for on liner channels.
Peacock is the best modern named , not free (otherwise Tubi and Pluto get a mention) streaming service. It's named after the logo from a broadcast network started in the radio days in 1926. Peacock , though, has decided to really only focus on what kind of works for it. It's not really the kid and family service, not that it doesn't have stuff for them, but not the focus. It's NBC's catch up service, it prides itself on sports, it has Bravo reality shows, and then tries some of it's own quirky originals. It's parent company has decided to shed most of the cable networks that came together through various mergers and times, to only focus on having Bravo, and keeping the broadcast networks on NBC and Telemundo. It's not an attempting to be broad streaming service and the cable networks, aren't necessary to ironically, Comcast's, world. anymore. USA Network, Syfy, etc. really had their identities stripped away a few years ago , as the networks mostly pulled away (not totally) from doing that fit what they were.
The only streaming service that came out in the new age streaming , so 2019-2021, that really could bank on being corporation name then stick a plus there, is Disney+. Disney is probably the only media company that is really well known as a brand first that connects them to most of their movies. They really have a hold on the animation side of the world where some movies have been wrongly given as Disney made movies. It was the perfect name for Disney to say their service is Disney plus some stuff they bought over the years. Disney really only side lines one brand in their streaming world that's poor ABC. ABC doesn't get much respect from the company and they've owned it for 30 years now. FX, which they bought during their 21st Century Fox purchase, gets lots of love with Hulu, and ESPN has its own service and will be getting its own direct to consumer offering soon.
I think there was a hard amount of understanding here with streaming names because it was kind of a jump on the bandwagon and get on the next shiny thing and the names kind of had just be made. How will Max going back to HBO Max go? Uhhh, guess we'll find out by 2028.
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