HBO Max Name Change Possibly on the Horizon

HBO Max only about a year into its campaign in the "streaming wars," and it is reportedly already considering a name change. According to a report by CNBC, several executives at WarnerMedia have disliked the name "HBO Max" since before launch, saying it is "confusing." They may try to use the impending merger between Warner Bros. and Discovery to amend it.

HBO Max was reportedly named by AT&T CEO John Stankey, along with WarnerMedia's former chairman Bob Greenblatt. It was intended to capitalize on the brand recognition of HBO while highlighting all the other legendary intellectual properties in the WarnerMedia catalog. The anonymous executives who dislike the name said that it was hard to differentiate from the existing HBO streaming options, and it seemed to limit the scope of the brand to the connotation that HBO itself already had. Some of those opponents left the company last year, but others are still in place and may try to invoke a name change.

"It sounds like 'supersized' HBO. I think it's still unclear how it's different from HBO unless you're familiar with the product. It was a typical AT&T decision," said one executive who left in 2020. When HBO Max launched, it replaced the existing services HBO Go and HBO Now. HBO Go was an app that allowed cable subscribers to watch HBO on a streaming device, while HBO Now allowed customers to get the service without buying a whole cable package.

However, HBO Max was always intended to be the streaming home for all WarnerMedia content - an umbrella that will soon grow to include Discovery.

"It's really our cable bundle. It makes more sense for HBO to live as a sub-brand of a renamed service," one current WarnerMedia executive said. "This can all be fixed. David (Zaslav) will have a chance to fix it."

Zaslav is the CEO of Discovery, and will soon have a lot of weight to throw around in the WarnerMedia sphere himself - assuming the merger goes as planned. In a recent earnings call with investors, AT&T executives said that they expect the merger to be finalized in the first quarter of 2022. At that point, HBO Max subscribers may need to watch out for a big change on their streaming homepage.