Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said streamer Max will add more than 6 million subscribers in the current quarter — after 3.6 million net adds for the three months ended in June — on a new bundle launched with Disney+ and Hulu and an international expansion push.
Speaking at the Goldman Sachs media conference he opined on the company’s difficult trajectory post-merger, the just-inked distribution deal with Charter Communications, and the outlook for the film and TV studio.
“At our core, we’re just a storytelling company,” he said. “That’s why we fought to bring Tom Cruise back. That’s why we fought to hold on to all the great talent. But we also have a real advantage. We have the best TV and motion picture library. So Beetlejuice was ours, and we developed it, and we own everything that relates to it. Harry Potter … we own it. And a lot of these franchises are franchises that people know everywhere in the world. It’s our big advantage, whether it’s Superman, Batman, all of DC, Game of Thrones, Beetlejuice, the Joker,” he said. The Penguin series is set to debut.
“We’re quite confident we have real momentum now, but we need to execute on it.”
On Max, which is the midst of a multi-year international expansion, he said “it’s if we have the best cookie, but we haven’t been able to get it on the shelves yet. We might have the best cookie, but if you go to the grocery store and it’s not on the shelf, you can’t create the value out of it.”
“We’re just getting started now, now that we’re available in a lot of Europe and Latin America, and within two years, we’ll be available in most of the world. We’re going to be on those shelves.” He said it looks like the streamer will end the quarter up by “six plus million subscribers.” DTC will hit $1 billion more in ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) next year.
WBD took a surprise $9.1 billion charge for the second quarter to write-down the value of linear assets in general, and especially given the likely loss of the NBA. Wall Streeters have wondered and worried since then how the loss would factor into a wave of carriage deals coming up over the next year. Earlier today, Warner and Charter announced a renewal — about a year early – that also gives the giant video and broadband provider access – for free — to Max and Discovery+ for its growing package of streamers.
Asked about the terms, Zaslav said, “We held price on TNT and, in the aggregate, for our cable business, we got paid more money for our 30 channels. And all of our channels are carried. There were no channels that were dropped.”
WBD has added sports over the last few years but it wasn’t at all clear they can make up for the loss of the NBA. Zaslav said the company has professional basketball this year “and, we hope, for the next 11 years … depending on how that turns out.”
WBD didn’t ink a deal with the League during an exclusive negotiating window and games were then split into three packages going to Disney/ESPN, Comcast/NBCUniversal and Amazon Prime Video. Warner’s contract had matching rights and it made an offer for the Amazon package, the least costly, but the NBA rejected it, calling it no match.