The Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Max streamer will launch in 22 European countries in spring 2024 and France and Belgium later next year, the media outfit revealed today.
Opening Mipcom Cannes with a keynote, interntional boss Gerhard Zeiler and EMEA Head of Streaming Leah Hooper Rosa brought highly-anticipated news of the rollout of the new streamer in the continent, which is rebranding from HBO Max with a bigger offering.
The Nordics, the Netherlands, Iberia and CEE, which already have HBO Max, will gain access to the rebranded streamer in the spring.
There will then be a “second wave” of launches later next year including in France and Belgium, which currently don’t have HBO Max, although WBD has an output deal with Amazon locally in France.
The streamer will air the Paris Olympics next summer alongside holding the wealth of content owned by WBD including HBO shows, Warner and Marvel movies. The service launched earlier this year in the U.S. and other territories. It will launch later in the UK due to the pre-existing content deal between Sky and WBD.
“The content breadth is so huge and we are enabling customers to find this content,” added Hooper Rosa. “And then they are increasing their time watching this breadth of genre, so streaming provides another avenue that compliments our distribution.”
Synergies
“We promised the market $3B synergies, now we are on the way to $5B and who knows where we will end up?,” Zeiler went on to say.
He talked up the success that WBD has had with its goal to “execute as efficiently as possible” its “defining mission and vision.”
Following the Warner Bros merger with Discovery, new boss David Zaslav said he was targeting $3B synergies, which has seen the merger of teams and thousands of layoffs, but that synergy figure has crept up and up, confirmed by Zeiler today to be approaching $5B by next year.
He reiterated a “culture eats strategy for breakfast” mantra and said “we are one company not six or seven diluted units.”
Zeiler has seen something off an exodus in his international team of late but this wasn’t addressed at Mipcom. He set a new team earlier this month following a spate of exits including the likes Priya Dogra, Pierre Branco and Hannes Heyelmann alongside Robert Blair, who had worked in Warner Bros sales for 25 years.
Zeiler was delivering a keynote on the first day of Mipcom, with Tencent’s Sun Zhonghuai coming next and Eva Longoria due to talk later today.
