Warner Bros. Discovery Announces Combined HBO Max, discovery+ to Launch in Spring 2023

Following the release of Warner Bros. Discovery's third-quarter earnings report on Thursday, company executives held a call with investors and analysts to discuss the state of the company.

One of the biggest topics discussed was the previously announced merger of the company’s disparate streaming services HBO Max and discovery+. On the company’s Q2 earnings call, CEO David Zaslav indicated that the service would premiere in the summer of 2023, but that timetable has apparently been moved up as WBD is now planning to launch the unified streamer in the spring of next year instead.

“We expect a healthy inflection with the launch of our combined service and expanded global footprint,” Zaslav said. “With that, we are excited to announce that we have moved up our U.S. launch date from summer of 2023 to spring. We’ve been very hard at work; we can make the service available to consumers around the globe and get the business running on all cylinders.”

The CEO confirmed that following the yet-to-be-named service’s debut in the United States, it would next launch in Latin America, followed by Europe in 2024.

The announcement comes on the heels of the company’s earnings report which included a global gain of 2.8 million customers, but only 500,000 of which were domestic. Nonetheless, the company now boasts just shy of 95 million global subscribers.

While WBD has previously indicated that there was not substantial customer overlap between HBO Max and discovery+ subscriber bases, presumably, the combined service would result in at least some sort of customer loss due to the elimination of redundancy.

Zaslav and company did not discuss was how much the new service would cost, or what it would be called. However, with the timetable sped up, it appears that those answers will likely be coming sooner than had originally been anticipated.