We’ve documented in detail how the whole AT&T–>Time Warner–>Warner Brothers Discovery merger process has been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku by over-compensated executives clearly out of their depths.
With streaming subscription growth saturated, the market has been forced to get “creative” in order to feed Wall Street its expected quarterly returns. That has meant sagging quality control for streaming services like Max, and a steady parade of price hikes and weird new restrictions that generally make subscribing less and less worth it.
Max execs are now consistent cheapskates. LIke when they simply shut down the entirety of the Comedy Central archives with zero concern for consumers or history. Or when the company pulls popular show archives offline because it’s too cheap to pay artist residuals. Or last week when Max executives made it clear they were no longer willing to pay for new episodes of Sesame Street, now in its 56th season:
“The long-running children’s series is looking for a new home for its original episodes, after Warner Bros. Discovery opted not to renew the Sesame output deal with HBO and Max…The decision not to continue the deal for new episodes stems from a change in strategy, with Max pivoting to focus more on adult and family programming, and placing less emphasis on kids fare like Sesame.”
Again though, there’s no real indication that Max brass or Time Warner Discovery CEO David Zaslav have any idea what they’re doing or who they hope to appeal to. They’re just mindlessly chasing lowest common denominator scale without any concern about the actual underlying product.
Yes, the last merger generated a brief stock bump and tax breaks, but product quality has very clearly been eroded and customers have increasingly been headed for the exits as streaming steadily gets enshittified. That’s driving more and more users back to piracy, which these executives are far more likely to blame on generational entitlement than their own incompetence.
Zaslav, like most media execs in streaming, is all out of any sort of original ideas. The kind of stuff that truly pleases customers (low prices, higher quality, improved customer support, better feature sets) costs money and erodes quarterly earnings. Instead Zaslav sees Trump 2.0 as an opportunity for more harmful consolidation, which will only continue to make the underlying products worse. That opens the door to entirely new waves of otherwise avoidable disruption.
