- HBO Max and Discovery Plus are two of
my favorite apps, and they are merging.
Maybe you've heard of this, maybe you haven't,
but yeah, Discovery and Warner Media are merging,
which means that those two streaming apps
are going to become one.
But what does that mean exactly?
Well, that's a good question.
So I've got five things that we do know
about the upcoming merger, and five questions
that remain unanswered, so let's dive in.
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All right, everybody, thanks for watching today.
Don't forget to like and subscribe if you enjoy this video.
Now, let's dive into it.
So let's start with the five things that we do know.
The first thing is pretty obvious.
I already said it: Warner Media and Discovery are merging.
That means that the HBO Max app and the Discovery Plus app
are going to be merging at some point.
Number two, we know that the merger
is going to take place sometime in early quarter two,
and most analysts are predicting April,
that the merger will happen sometime in mid to late April.
Number three, we know that this is going to start
as a bundle, and then move to a single app.
So at first, while they're figuring out all the kinks
and whatnot, they will provide some kind of bundle.
What does that mean exactly?
I don't know, we'll get there.
Number four, we know that when the apps finally do converge
and become one, that there will continue to be
an ad-free version, and what they call an ad-lite tier.
And number five, we know that this
will be a unified app globally.
Now, what I mean by that is there won't be
a different version of this newfangled app
in the US versus elsewhere.
I'm sure there will be some content differences
and whatnot, but they are going to try to create
one globally unified approach to the HBO Max Discovery app.
Okay, so that's what we know.
But what about what we don't know?
I've still got five questions that need answering.
Number one, they say that they're going to bundle
the apps before they combine them,
but what does bundled even mean?
Does it mean that there will be a single sign-on option
that will get you into both platforms,
does it mean that they're gonna migrate content
from one to the other and vice versa?
We don't know exactly what this means.
Presumably they would go with kind of that
Disney Plus/Hulu/ESPN Plus model, but who knows?
Maybe it'll be something different
because this is supposed to be a transition period.
Because they're not trying to build something permanent
with this bundle, they may go with a different approach.
Number two, when will the apps go
from bundled to combined?
Nobody's answering this question yet,
and I'm not sure I have a great guess.
I would hope that it would be by the end of this year.
That'd be great, but I'm sure there are
licensing considerations, and frankly,
it just takes time to build apps like this.
Number three is a big one, how much will the new app cost?
Okay, so we're taking HBO Max,
which has a $10 and a $15 tier,
depending on how much you hate commercials,
and we're combining that with Discovery Plus,
which has a similar setup for five and seven dollars.
If we combine the ad-free tiers of those,
that would be $22 a month.
Is that what this app is gonna cost,
or are they going to bring that price down?
Are they gonna keep it at the $15 HBO Max tier,
or by adding the Discovery content,
are they going to be forced to raise the price
to 18, 20 bucks a month?
We don't know yet.
Question number four is will one of these apps
be the dominant one, and here's what I mean.
When we are finally combining the apps,
will it be HBO Max with Discovery content,
will it be Discovery Plus with HBO Max content,
or will it be something brand new entirely?
I don't know.
While I like both apps, and I'm not necessarily
rooting for one over the other,
I gotta say, I'm really tired of the HBO changes
in their names, the confusing changes
that seemed to have finally gone away when we got HBO Max.
So obviously, we had HBO for years and years,
and then we had HBO Go, and HBO Now,
and HBO this, and that, and the other,
and it all got very confusing.
It was nice when they finally settled in to HBO Max,
and said, "This is it."
Well, is it going to be something else?
Is Discovery going to be the dominant partner here,
and you know, make it a Discovery-based app?
I don't know.
If they do that, yeah, it'll be frustrating for me,
but more importantly, it'll be confusing for others
who don't follow this stuff so closely.
What happened to HBO?
I guess we'll see.
And the other reason I wonder which one is dominant
is because of question number five,
which is will one or both of these apps go away?
And what happens to existing subscriptions
on an app that goes away?
So will they build a completely new third app,
and then funnel subscriptions,
existing subscriptions, from HBO Max and Disney Plus
into the single app, will they build this
around HBO Max, and shut down Discovery Plus, or vice versa?
Who knows, but these are the kind of questions
that'll be important to those of us
who use these apps on a daily basis.
And I know there are other questions out there as well,
I just kind of limited myself to five for no real reason.
So hit the comments below, let me know
what questions you have.
I'll be really interested to see
what everybody has to say about this particular merger,
if you're excited for it, if you wish it weren't happening,
if you wanna keep these things separated, and let me know.
'Cause this is definitely the kind of thing
that we'll be keeping an eye on going forward.
All right everybody, thanks for watching.
Don't forget to like and subscribe,
and come by on Fridays at two p.m. Eastern
for the live stream I do every week here on this channel.
I will see you there.