With Max Launching in 7 Asian Markets, Warner Bros. Discovery Eyes Rapid Growth for Streamer: “This Is a Big One”
Nearly four-and-a-half years after Max launched in the U.S., Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming platform finally debuted in several key Asian markets this week.
On Nov. 19, Max became available to customers in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as the five biggest Southeast Asian countries of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines. Outwardly, the long delayed introduction of Max into some of the fastest-growing economies in the world may seem odd, especially as streaming rivals Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ have established strong footholds in many of these markets. But the reality was that WBD had various licensing agreements across the Asia Pacific region, which took years to run their course. Indeed, the company’s distribution deal with Foxtel doesn’t expire till 2025, allowing Max to launch in Australia next year.
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Still, there’s some upside to coming to market later than your rivals, that’s according to JB Perrette, president of global streaming and games at WBD and James Gibbons, WBD’s president of Asia Pacific. Ahead of the most recent seven-country Asian rollout of Max, The Hollywood Reporter spoke to Perrette and Gibbons over Zoom about WBD’s strategy for Max in the region, what differentiates the service from other streamers, as well as updates on other markets.
Let’s start by talking about the seven-country rollout for Max in Asia Pacific.
JB PERRETTE The exciting thing is, we’ve got a whole set of markets that we’re still not in. This is the beginning, it’s just a start. When we came in and closed [the Warner Bros. Discovery merger deal], the company’s previous administration was getting ready to launch in Southeast Asia, and so this has been two years coming. But we’re super excited because this is sort of the last of our big regional “replatformings.” We did the U.S. in May of 2022-23. We did Latin America in February of this year. We did Europe in May and June. And now [Asia] is the last of the big replatformings. There’ll be additional rollouts and launches coming after that. But, this is a big one and it’s an exciting one because it’s the most different than anything we’ve done before because we’re going from a two-generations-ago HBO Go product to a much bigger and more expansive and better content offering with Max. A much better product experience with Max and more distribution partnerships and entry points for consumers thanks to the work that James and his team have been doing with all of our partners. And so, it’s a big day for us.
JAMES GIBBONS We’ve launched in Japan and in New Zealand and now across these seven markets. [The other countries like Korea] are a work-in-progress. [If] you’re familiar with our model, which is that where we haven’t been doing streaming, we’ve been doing content licensing. So that’s how our content gets out there. But we are certainly working on the streaming plan across the rest of the region.
Looking through all the information on the rollout, I haven’t seen anything about ad tiers in these markets. Is that part of the strategy in APAC?
PERRETTE Globally, up until last year, ad tier was only available in one market, which is the U.S. [Ad tier] is now available in over 45 markets, all of Latin America and a handful of European markets. In Southeast Asia, we haven’t seen the opportunity there [for ad-tiers]. We don’t see the opportunity there yet. And so we will be doing stuff that’s unique, particularly in terms of retail direct selling a mobile tier. That’s a different SKU in Indonesia and the Philippines. We are doing some different and unique things that we haven’t done anywhere else in the world in those two markets. But for now, in Southeast Asia, we don’t see the opportunity for an ad-supported tier because we just don’t see yet the monetization and the digital video space as significant enough as we look at other markets in Asia, Australia. Eventually, when we do roll out our own direct-to-consumer offering in other markets in North Asia, there may be opportunities to roll out an ad tier, but Southeast Asia, there won’t be an ad tier for now.
It has taken some time for Max to launch in Southeast Asia. Do you have a strategy for winning subscribers in these markets? Your competitors like Netflix, Disney and Amazon have got a bit of a head start there…
PERRETTE I think there’s, there’s a couple of things. First of all, I like to say, “Thank God we’re not in the widgets business,” so we’re not selling what other people are selling. And you’re right, the market’s been around, it’s 2024, and people have been in the market for a lot longer than we have. So on the one hand, that’s a disadvantage. The flip side is the content offering and what we will bring to the market and what will come off [other platforms] in some cases things like Friends that are currently nurturing other services, that now will be exclusively available on Max. The Harry Potter franchise. When you think about Harry Potter, in this part of the world it is probably one of our biggest franchises. And so the number one thing is our content is differentiated and won’t be available anywhere else. And that’s at the core of it. There’s obviously HBO originals, Max originals, all exclusive. The best of Hollywood movies, because we’ll have the most Pay-One movies of anybody with Warner’s slate. Universal and Paramount [all will have] a home on Max. You’ll have beloved franchises from the WB library. The primary thing is you have content here that you won’t get anywhere else and some of the content that’s coming back from services where it had been very popular and it will be [on Max now].
The second thing and I’ll pass it to James is, look, we’re cognizant of it, but it’s also why we’ve been leaning into all these partnerships with our existing pay TV operators as well as new partnerships with mobile [operators] components of those business is this new mobile SKU trying to find ways to accelerate the adoption and get Max in the hands of more consumers more quickly. Acknowledging that the sooner we can do that and the sooner we can get people loving the product, the better it will be and that we do need some help. And it’s the benefit of having these long-term partnerships that we’ve had for a long time with a lot of players in the market.
GIBBONS The partnerships is key because our lane is so clear. We’ve got the best movie offering, we’ve got the only service with Harry Potter, with DC and Friends. So essentially, the partners are helping us to get the word out there because we are a central part of their bundle. That’s the B2B side and we’re expanding the number of partners. Our approach has a significant element of working with the key players to do that. On the direct-to-consumer side, we’re really going to double down on the social media aspect because essentially that’s the best way to reach a retail segment. We haven’t had the product to be active in that way up until now, but with Max, at the level of product and content that we have on that, it will be much, much busier in the social media space. And so between those two, the challenge is reach and awareness. That’s our first goal. But we’ve got some good tools lined up both on, on the B2B and the D2C front.
So in the U.S., Max is leaning into sports and live TV with CNN, is that something that’s going to come to Asia? Is that something that you’re looking at or it’s not going to work initially?
PERRETTE I would say our bigger focus is obviously getting the product out, starting to see it settle in the market, focus on an entertainment service. Sports is really powerful. But it’s also one that is expensive and hard to figure out exactly how you make it work as a business model. We’ve got a number of experiments going on in other parts of the world to try and figure out how the model can work. I think we’re pretty comfortable right now using those experiments to see how we can prove out how premium sports in a streaming environment can make business sense and the reality is, not just us, but I think the entire industry has yet to prove that out.
But WBD owns CNN, and CNN is really popular in Asia. Is that something that’s gonna be available on launch for the Max app?
PERRETTE It won’t be available at launch, but it is something we can definitely do. Obviously, particularly given results of the U.S. election, there may be more interest in what’s happening in the U.S. We’ve now done that in a handful of markets in Europe. So that is something we absolutely could do. We’re focused for the moment on just getting the entertainment proposition. But as we get into 2025 certainly that’s something we’ll look at.
Looking at the world of TV, it is fragmenting. As it’s becoming more and more fragmented, the big consumer issue is confusion. Does Max help clear confusion or does it add to it?
PERRETTE It’s a great question and we agree that we’re getting to a point of “peak confusion” and peak number of services. But I think we look at Max as a really compelling part of an ecosystem. And I think what you’re gonna see over the next couple of years is because of exactly the dynamic you described, frankly, in some cases too much content, too many services, too expensive as an aggregation now. Whether that re-aggregation happens through structural consolidation like M&A or whether the re-aggregation happens through commercial partnerships like bundles ingest models, etc. I think you’re going to see some of both. And for us, it’s not about “we just want to add Max to the fray, it’s one more service.” But as local partners in all these markets are thinking about their future and the fact that I think in the end, you’re gonna have a handful of big global streaming platforms, [the local players] not only want to get their content well viewed and well distributed in their local market but are interested in getting that content distributed and visible outside their local market. Max is a logical partner for all those players because the bigger guys in the space aren’t interested in partnerships, they’re interested in just running the table. And so it’s not about another service, I’d look at Max as a platform and a service that ultimately is open for business with local partners where we can be a constructive service that could serve as an aggregator if you will of sorts for content and try and be constructive and simplifying the consumer experience going forward.
GIBBONS I completely agree. I think the point is that we believe our proposition is very differentiated and that it’s essential. For the consumer, if you’re looking for the best Pay-One movies proposition, if you’re a Harry Potter fan, a Friends fan, a Godzilla fan, then this is an essential part of the entertainment proposition. And that’s why we have such big distribution across all of the partners in the region because we have a lane. We’re not adding to the confusion because our fans are already there. We’re just serving the people who are there. And over time there will be simplification in the bundle, but we’re confident about our position in it.
Last question, if we can zoom out a little. After Asia, what’s next in terms of Max’s expansion?
PERRETTE After Asia, there are big markets. Obviously Australia, we’ve talked about for 2025, you have Korea, you have other markets in Southeast Asia that [we haven’t yet rolled out in]. We currently are in a licensing business in India — at some point in time, we’ll come back and revisit. Three of the biggest European markets we’re not in because of our Sky deal that expires at the end of next year. The Middle East, Africa. So the good news is, when we look at our addressable market for Max as compared to our bigger streaming peers, today, we’re in just a little over half the addressable markets as measured by broadband households as those guys. And we’re at 110 million subscribers. So if you think about we’re going to almost double that over the course of the next two years. And if our penetration stays close to what it is in these other markets, it’s a huge opportunity for more subscriber growth. The next two years, we’ve got a massive tailwind as we roll out more international markets every quarter and see growth. And that’s just one part of it. The ad monetization [will see] more penetration trying to get penetration and growth in our content lineup. And content investment continues to improve the product experience, it’s getting better every quarter, every month. We went from bad to good, but we haven’t yet gone from good to great on the product experience side. Password sharing crackdowns, we haven’t even started. So we’ve got a number of different levers to drive the growth of Max, which is why we’re so excited because we feel like we’re in the very early chapters of this incredible book that we’re writing over the next couple of years.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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