Following its combined OTT plans, Warner Bros. Discovery will release Max in some parts of Asia between 2024 and 2025. The company announced this recently, and it will be right after the Paris Summer Olympics.
The company has a strategy where it intends to bring its strong catalog of originals, content from its film studios, the lifestyles of Discovery, and also the enormous offering of classic animation and its Adult Swim unit.
J.B. Perrette, CEO and President of Global Streaming and Games, who recently participated in a conference at the APOS conferences, is determined to launch the service in Asia, with the exception of some markets, where the rights to operate with some titles make it impossible for them.
‘We have a strong catalog of large franchises that do not have distribution rights there, so that will be one of our big bets’, said Perrette. And although he did not specify whether they have local originals in the pipeline, he did say that ‘they are exploring ways to partner with local creators and producers to develop new ideas for the service’.
The programming strategies are not yet official, but everything indicates that the acquisitions will be aimed at the growing number of Korean titles on the service, and thus take advantage of the enormous engagement of these markets towards K-dramas.
At the conference, the executive referred to the reorganization that the service has undergone, calling it ‘gram excess and undervaluation’. It is worth noting that in Asia, the company still operates digitally with the defunct HBO Go in America and Europe, which will eventually be called Max. Furthermore, the traditional TV business has not represented major problems, so it is still a vertical that they do not plan to dismiss from the action plan.
