After more than a year of brutal cancellations and layoffs at HBO, it seems David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, more than ever committed to fast revenue. Warner Bros. Discovery may license HBO Original Series to Netflix, deadline reported yesterday. deadlinesources claim it’s a financial move that HBO’s old guard disagreed with, but it’s necessary to bolster profits. They also say the deal may not see the light of day.
The show alleged to be the subject of the agreement is Issa Rae’s Insecure, which lived on HBO for five seasons until it ended in December 2021. Other shows would follow after that. The deal would not be exclusive; WBD would still release the series on its own platform, Max.
This wouldn’t be the first TV or movie to air on two different streaming networks. Thanks to some contractual madnessyou can currently watch Avatar: The way of the water on both Disney Plus and Max. But this would be WBD’s first major streaming deal since it sold a package of canceled shows earlier this year to free ad-supported television networks (FAST), including Roku and Tubi. Those shows include the recently canceled ones West world and the unaired episodes of the Joss Whedon series The Nevers.
While the owner of a streaming service selling content to competitors is uncommon, it was somewhat normal for many years. In 2014, Warner Bros. licensed some of its biggest shows to Amazon Prime Video, including The sopranos And The wire, and prior to that, it syndicated edited versions of some shows to TBS and TV Guide. It wasn’t until streaming services tried to create their own content in recent years that sales of shows to competing services slowed down.
But last year, Zaslav made it clear that his company “open for businessand they wouldn’t sacrifice their profits to get more Max subscribers. “We have a lot of content that has stood still for reasons of principle,” said CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels at a Bank of America event last year.
The current rumored licensing deal comes on the heels of WBD’s recent rebranding and relaunch of HBO Max as simply Max, which saw a new price point for 4K video and some signs that the rollout was rushed, resulting in an embarrassing credit problem for which WBD was forced to apologize because it has lumped writers, directors, and everyone else under a single “creators” headline, angering notable WGA writers. (Revelation: The edge‘s editorial staff is also affiliated with the Writers Guild of America, East.)
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Zaslav’s “open for business” approach, but it’s rare to see high-quality shows like the ones HBO is known for across multiple platforms as first-party content is hoarded in streaming foxholes. And it’s a more fun story than a movie where people put time and work into it for tax reasons.
