David Zaslav proves once again that he’s painfully out of touch
David Zaslav proves once again that he’s painfully out of touch
The Warner Bros. Discovery CEO’s latest comments showing how out-of-touch with reality he is are sure to elicit some outrage. It’s deserved.
It seems that David Zaslav just can’t help himself. Or perhaps he’s so deeply ensconced in his own world that he really is insulated from all the blowback of the things he says and does. Either way, the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO continues to make statement after statement that shows he has very little regard for the customers that pay his astronomically large salary. His latest faux pas came at a Goldman Sachs investor conference this week as he demonstrated his patented lack of empathy for subscribers, as he boasted that the HBO Max streaming service (already one of the most expensive on the market) has plenty of room to substantially increase prices.
Key Details:
- Significant increases coming: Zaslav said HBO Max is “way underpriced,” and that there will be room for future increases.
- Say one thing, do another: The CEO touted the content available on HBO Max, despite recent high-profile removals.
- Unseen fallout?: The situation is reminiscent of Zaslav’s comments regarding not needing the NBA to remain on TNT.
Zaslav was more than willing to expound on his views that HBO Max has plenty of runway to increase prices in the coming years. He said WBD thinks the streamer is “way underpriced,” and though he pledged to enact price increases in a measured way, he pointed to marquee intellectual property like “Harry Potter” and the DC Universe as reasons that the platform has so much more room to grow from a pricing standpoint.
Anyone who has listened to Zaslav on an earnings call or read transcripts of those events knows he loves to name-drop the franchises owned by WBD, and they are indeed a formidable lineup. But he talks about monetizing those properties in a unique way; he so publicly delights in the ability to make money off those IPs in ways that other studio heads are at least a bit more demure about.
As Zaslav found room to range on the issue of price on Wednesday, he further strayed from the perception that most average consumers have about entertainment costs. One recent survey from Hub Research found that customers are spending more and feel like they're getting less, since they now have to turn to ad-supported streaming plans to save money. But Zaslav’s words paint a seemingly utopian picture of an entertainment industry that doesn’t actually exist; one that has cut costs and improved content access for viewers.
“Consumers in America were paying twice as much 10 years ago for content,” Zaslav said. “People were spending on average $55 for content 10 years ago. The amount of content they were getting, the spend is up like 10 or 12-fold, and they’re paying dramatically less. I think we want a good deal for consumers. I think over time, there’s real opportunity, particularly for us in that quality area, to raise price.”
There’s a lot to dissect here. First, the idea that consumers in America are paying half as much for content as they were 10 years ago is not supported by data. The Hub Research survey cited above found that the average monthly spend on TV services in 2025 is $83, and an April survey from TiVo found that customers are spending around $160 per month on entertainment.
Factor in Zaslav’s assertion that people were spending “on average $55 for content 10 years ago.” If that were true, customers are spending nearly twice as much now for entertainment as compared to 10 years ago, not the other way around. It’s also worth noting that, per Leichtman Research Group, mean monthly spending on pay-TV in 2015 was $99.10, so Zaslav’s figure of $55 doesn’t seem based in any sort of reality.
In addition to raising the price of HBO Max, Zaslav also discussed plans to more aggressively enforce password-sharing rules that were implemented earlier this year; forcing some users to pay (or pay more) for a service that they had previously been using for free (or for less). While the implementation of these types of rules is now the norm across the industry, consumers still don’t like, and won’t take kindly to Zaslav’s efforts to expand them.
Viewers will also no doubt have some colorful things to say about Zaslav’s assertion that content availability has increased as costs have fallen. Consider the content cuts that HBO Max has seen since Zaslav took the helm in 2022; in August of that year, kids content including “Sesame Street” began to be purged from the streamer. More and more kids’ titles have been pulled from the service in the intervening years, and episodes of “Courage the Cowardly Dog” are the latest to fall under the Zaslav scythe. The exec has also overseen the removal of HBO Max originals and HBO legacy programs from the streamer as well.
The latest comments from Zaslav are hardly the first time that he’s shown a willingness to disregard caution when making public statements. Just months after the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, Zaslav boldly said that WBD’s TNT Sports didn’t “have to have the NBA,” in reference to upcoming contract talks with the league. Those swagger-filled words didn’t exactly measure up to Zaslav’s actions when he launched a desperate lawsuit to keep NBA rights after the league called his bluff, and got Amazon and NBC to pony up considerably more money to take over as league broadcast partners.
There was a potential side-eyed reference to that fiasco during Wednesday’s talk, when Zas tried to spin the company as being “less and less dependent on sport.” But try as he likes, Zaslav can’t avoid the uncomfortable truth that he’s now overseeing the split of a company he brought together just three years ago. WBD announced this summer that it was splitting into two companies, one focused on its movie studio and the HBO Max streaming service, the other housing WBD-owned linear channels and the discovery+ streamer. There is no amount of spin that can frame this as anything more than a failure on Zaslav’s part.
In fairness to Zaslav, he has overseen the transition of WBD’s direct-to-consumer segment from a loss machine into a profitable operation. But the split of the company into separate entities just a few years after Zaslav’s assumption of the reins can also be fairly interpreted as an admission that the company can’t pull those networks out of the cord-cutting spiral, an act that Paramount’s new ownership team is committing to trying.
A mix of brashness, confidence, and ego is no doubt necessary to rise to the position of CEO at a company with as much history and power as WBD in the first place, but in Zaslav’s case, those combined qualities continue to manifest as out-of-touch statements from a man making tens of millions of dollars every year. Whether it will lead to customer backlash is yet to be seen, but if it does, Zaslav will have no one to blame but himself… again.
HBO Max
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