Warner Bros. Discovery Combined Streaming Service Has Been Moved Up, Will Now Launch In Spring 2023
It turns out we won't have to wait much longer for Warner Bros. Discovery's combined streaming service to arrive. During the company's third-quarter earnings call on Thursday, CEO David Zaslav announced that the still-unnamed service will arrive in the United States in the spring of 2023. As previously announced, this streamer is set to combine the libraries of HBO Max and Discovery+.
"We expect a healthy inflection [of direct-to-consumer subscribers] with the launch of our combined service and expanded global footprint," said Zaslav. "We're excited to announce that we have moved up our U.S. launch date from Summer of 2023 to Spring."
Considering how little we still know about this service, this is a pretty big deal. It sounds like Zaslav and other higher-ups at Warner Bros. Discovery sound confident in this new platform, and it definitely appears that development on it has gone faster than expected. The international rollout periods will remain the same, starting with the Latin American rollout in the fall of 2023.
"We can't wait to make the service available to consumers around the globe, and get the business running on all cylinders," he continued.
What else we know about this new service
Further details on this new service remain under wraps, but during August's second-quarter earnings call, we were given an idea of what it hopes to achieve. According to streaming executive JD Perrette at the time, this new platform aims to utilize the benefits and drawbacks of both HBO Max and Discovery+ in order to reach as many consumers as possible:
"HBO Max has a competitive feature set but has had performance and customer issues. Discovery+ has best-in-class performance and consumer ratings, but more limited features. Our combined service will focus on delivering the best of both market-leading features with world-class performance."
As for HBO Max and Discovery+ currently, both services have a combined 94.9 million subscribers, about three million more from the second quarter. However, that is still a far cry from the number of subscribers Warner Bros. Discovery likely wants – according to Statista, Netflix has around 223 million subscribers worldwide. With the company's intent to launch globally, they will likely strive to achieve around this number of subscribers, but it will probably be a long road to get there.