The streaming wars are over and with them the era of cheap, buffet-style content delivery systems is coming to an end. Prices are getting jacked up. Subscribers are getting nickel-and-dimed. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav is here to promise you that HBO Max will be doing this too.
“We haven’t been pushing on the password sharing and the economics yet,” the cosmic-brained exec told other rich people at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology conference this week, per Variety. “People are really starting to love HBO Max. That’s the key. We want them to fall in love with our content, with our series, with the differentiated offering outside the U.S. and then over time, it’s a little tricky, with the password sharing, we’re going to begin to push on that.”
You can tell Zaslav loves his job because he talks about locating the optimal pricing strategy for other people’s creative output like he’s searching for the G-spot on a P&L spreadsheet. Warner Bros. announced last month that it would soon start aggressively monitoring HBO subscribers’ accounts to make sure they weren’t letting friends and family mooch off them. But the password sharing crackdown isn’t the only thing coming to the home of The Last Of Us and Peacemaker.
He continued, “I think our ability to raise price as people become more and more in love with the quality that we have and the series that we have and the offering that we have will have a real ability because I think the pricing across the board—not only is there too many players, in order to stay alive, a lot of the players have just decided to drop prices aggressively.”
HBO Max’s first major price hike came in 2023 when the main plan went from $15 to $16 a month. The following year prices went up again as the plans splintered, with the Ultimate tier rising to $21 a month. HBO became HBO Max in 2020, then just Max in 2023, and then went back to HBO Max earlier this year. During that same period Zaslav saw the disastrous merger of Warner Bros. and Discovery that led to tons of debt and massive gutting of content at, among other places, HBO. Now Warner Bros. and Discovery will split up again by April 2026 as the stock price hovers below $20, down from a peak in 2021 of over $70.
Big “my job here is done” energy from the guy awarded $50 million last year in total compensation for shuffling logos around on a whiteboard. Except we now know his job won’t truly be done until he jacks up HBO prices a few more times. Next year sees the arrival of a new Game of Thrones spin-off, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, and the Green Lantern detective show, followed by the Harry Potter reboot in 2027.
“I think we want a good deal for consumers,” Zaslav said this week, “but I think over time, there’s real opportunity, particularly for us, in that quality area, to raise price.”