Warner Bros. Discovery has clarified its plans after much speculation about HBO Max’s launch plans for the French market.
It had been anticipated that the HBO Max streaming service would debut in France next year, although there was never any official confirmation from the media company.
On Wednesday, Warner Bros. Discovery told Broadband TV News that there will be no immediate launch in France of the stand-alone product. “France remains a strategically important market and we will communicate the launch of the platform in due course.”
Instead, it is likely that a decision will be made in France to combine the service in a sort of HBO-Discovery-Eurosport triptych. This in fact was the proposal made last March by David Zaslav CEO and President after the merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery.
“For the time being, we will not enter any new markets. We will not aggressively chase subscriber growth as long as we are working on one priority, which is to merge these products together,” Zaslav stated at the time.
It also emerged earlier this week that HBO Max will no longer produce original content in the Nordic region, Central Europe, the Netherlands, and Turkey. The streaming platform will also remove some content to free itself from licensing agreements with third parties. The main goal is to achieve savings of $3 billion over the next two years. The decision comes as a result of the restructuring of international divisions and is not expected to involve Spanish and French productions or free-to-air networks.
