| When David Zaslav merged Discovery with WarnerMedia in 2022 to create Warner Bros. Discovery, he was quick to criticize the previous regime. He said the company was a total mess and set about overhauling the strategy. He renamed the streaming service Max and canceled the news subscription service CNN+. Now he’s reversing those decisions. CNN is working on not one but a few subscription products. And Max is changing its name back to HBO Max. “As someone who helped lead HBO Max’s global expansion pre-merger, I honestly can’t decide whether to laugh or cry,” Manuel Urrutia posted on LinkedIn, a sentiment shared by many top executives in the previous regime. Credit to the team at HBO/Max, which understood why people were laughing and leaned into the criticism on social media. Zaslav abandoned the HBO name because he felt it was a hindrance. He wanted his streaming service to appeal to everyone in the world — a la Netflix — and he was going to do this by combining the quality of HBO and Warner Bros. shows and films with the reality programming of the Discovery networks. He threw in some kids’ content for good measure. Research suggested that millions of Americans would never pay for a service called HBO, a network of the coasts, while a lot of people overseas had never heard of HBO at all. The network’s boss, Casey Bloys, was happy to drop HBO from the service’s name because he didn’t want his Tiffany brand associated with Dr. Pimple Popper and 90-Day Fiance. Yet in dropping the HBO name, Zaslav and his streaming chief JB Perrette threw out a brand that means something to people and replaced it with a generic name that stands for nothing. (At least Peacock is memorable.) The brand overhaul failed to deliver immediate results. The streaming service’s share of US viewing didn’t grow, sitting between 1% and 1.5% month after month. HBO customers didn’t flock to Discovery shows, nor did Discovery’s programming lure lots of new subscribers. In recent months, a growing contingent of employees pushed to bring the HBO name back. Their best argument with Zaslav and Perrette was a simple one: Just look at the data. While the effort to broaden the service had failed, Max had started to grow over the last year thanks to international expansion, a crackdown on password sharing and a strong HBO slate to start this year. They changed the colors back to the classic HBO black and white earlier this year. Changing the name back to HBO Max – and distancing the service from some of the kids’ and reality programming that were part of the relaunch – may also help further another corporate agenda. Zaslav is exploring spinning off his cable networks. It’ll be easier to separate the Discovery networks from HBO if they aren’t a huge part of the streaming service. The Max-HBO Max reversal is the latest in the network’s tortured history with names. First there was HBO Go. Then HBO Now. Then HBO Max. While this may seem trivial, it is symbolic of years of dysfunction and missed opportunities. HBO was slow to embrace streaming and then changed its mind over the right approach. Zaslav isn’t the first executive to struggle with HBO’s place in a post-cable world. Should it be a premium-priced service with a more limited offering? Or a mass-market service? Could it be both premium and mass market? HBO is still one of the best brands in entertainment and it has managed cord-cutting better than Showtime (all but dead) and Starz (valued at just $217 million). But HBO, a premium brand that once cost almost twice as much as Netflix, now retails for much less than Netflix in the US. Netflix collects $17.26 per user in the US, as of the end of last year. Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming business, which is mostly HBO, collects $11.15, as of the first quarter of this year. The numbers are even worse abroad. A surprise Netflix sightingSpeaking of Netflix, perhaps the strangest sighting of all over upfronts week was Walt Disney Parks Chief Josh D’Amaro walking around the company’s presentation and after party. D’Amaro is a major buyer of advertising, but you don’t see many major executives from other media companies — also major advertisers — showing up at their rivals’ upfronts. (Studio chiefs that produce TV shows for other companies are the one big exception.) Senior Netflix executives seemed genuinely surprised he was there, though they had polite conversation. D’Amaro was basking in the glow of his successful announcement of a new theme park, as well as strong corporate earnings. Sports sports sportsSports have always been a major part of upfront week. But at some presentations it felt like the only part. The schedules at Fox and NBC are dominated by sports and reality TV. Amazon brought out Travis and Jason Kelce, as well as the hosts of its NFL and NBA coverage. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell appeared at two different upfronts. A decade ago, broadcast networks announced more than 30 new scripted series at the upfronts. This year? About a dozen. The biggest sports news of the week arrived on May 13, when ESPN finally announced the name and price of its forthcoming streaming service, formerly known as flagship. It will be called ESPN and cost $30 a month. Disney really wants you to sign up for the bundle that includes Disney+ and Hulu. That will also cost $30 a month – for now – and eventually $35 a month. This service confronts the same challenge facing every other sports-specific streamer. It has some sports — for a price that is somewhere between Netflix and cable. If you are a diehard sports fan, you are still paying for cable in some form. If not, you are probably not buying a sports-specific service. Disney would like to make ESPN the hub for all your sports needs, a place where you can watch your local professional baseball team courtesy of a deal with MLB or Sunday football thanks to deals with Fox or CBS. But ESPN needs leagues and rivals to sign off on that. For now, the company just wants people to pay for ESPN in some way, be it through a cable provider or directly. YouTube’s momentThe upfronts week ended with YouTube, the biggest show of them all. Emerging pop star Alex Warren, Lady Gaga, a little Hot Ones and MrBeast. MrBeast showed up in person for YouTube on Wednesday but via video for Amazon on Monday. Read into that what you will. He also made comments about how people always ask him when he is going Hollywood, but YouTube is his real home. YouTube hit people over the head with the same message it has for the past several years. “We are the center of culture. We are the most watched service on television.” As someone told me on Friday, YouTube is the new broadcast TV and streaming (led by Netflix) is the new cable. The best of Screentime (and other stuff) | Hollywood responds to Trump’s tariff threats | Jon Voight joined forces with Hollywood studios and unions to propose a plan for bringing production back to the US. They aren’t proposing major tariffs – nor do they want them. They want tax incentives. That starts at the state level. Everyone would like to see California adopt incentives to bring more production back to the home state of Hollywood. This would make it more competitive with places like New Jersey and Georgia. But in order for movie studios to shift their biggest productions from London to the US, they argue the federal government needs to help. “It’s become harder and harder to not only produce in California, which is obviously the home of the business, but it’s also gotten harder to produce in the United States as a whole,” Susan Sprung, head of the Producers Guild of America, told my colleague Thomas Buckley. It’s unclear if a conservative president and Congress will authorize a big federal tax break for Hollywood. The DOJ’s case against Live NationThe US Justice Department is investigating whether Live Nation and AEG colluded in their response to the coronavirus pandemic. This is a criminal investigation, separate from the government’s civil case. Unlike the civil case, the government hasn’t decided whether to press charges here. Live Nation said it did nothing illegal. The company formed a task force with AEG and some major talent agencies not long after the pandemic shut down the live music business (and much of the world). They discussed the best way to handle refunds and artist contracts. While Live Nation and AEG had similar policies for a little while, they ultimately diverged. Most experts assumed the DOJ’s interest in Live Nation would fade during the Trump administration. Yet the live music business and the price of concert tickets is the rare subject to unite both parties. Actual reform – in the courts or Congress – remains far away. The Wall Street billionaire vs. the music mogulBill Ackman is leaving the board of Universal Music Group, ending a tumultuous couple years for the hedge fund billionaire and the world’s largest music company. Ackman has been one of the largest investors in the company and was an occasional thorn in the side of CEO Lucian Grainge. He pushed for the company to relist in the US and pressured Grainge to exert his market power even more. The No. 1 song in the world is…Ordinary by Alex Warren. The longtime YouTuber and former member of the influence collective the Hype House has topped the Spotify charts just a few years after he started making music. Atlantic Records has spent a bunch of money pushing Warren over the last several months. The No. 1 movie in the world is…Final Destination: Bloodlines. The sixth installment in the horror franchise — and the first in more than a decade — grossed $51 million in the US and Canada this weekend and topped $100 million worldwide. That makes three consecutive wins for Warner Bros. ahead of F1 and Superman. Deals, deals, deals - Billionaire Marc Benioff and movie producer Neal Moritz are investing in the influencer company Whalar.
- The head of the biggest organization for independent music labels is leaving – and he spoke to Ashley Carman about TikTok, Spotify and the state of the music industry’s relationship with technology.
- More drama at Sony’s video game studios.
Rilo Kiley has reunited after almost 20 years, and yes I am one of the people revisiting their catalog. | 
