Bringing a months-long saga to a (likely) end, Netflix announced last week that it was backing away from its attempt to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, instead leading the way for Paramount to win the bidding.
The deal, if it gains government approval and goes through, will have several major effects. Two of the oldest legacy Hollywood studios, respectively founded in 1923 (Warner Bros.) and 1912 (Paramount) will become one. The Ellison family will consolidate their control over media, with possible effects on politics, with the generally pro-Trump corporate entity also gaining control of CNN. There’s a very good chance that large numbers of employees will lose their jobs.
But there’s one thing that’s likely to be noticed by consumers: As confirmed by the new owners, HBO Max and Paramount+ will be combined into a single streaming service.
HBO has had quite a few owners of the years. It was part of Time, Inc., then Time Warner, then AOL Time Warner, then Time Warner again, then AT&T (which renamed it WarnerMedia), then the Warner Bros. Discovery combination.
Through all of that, HBO has managed to keep its reputation and quality, more or less, intact, largely because all of those owners, despite all of their faults, have been aware that HBO’s value comes from that quality and reputation. After all, not even AOL Time Warner could screw up the early years of The Sopranos.
But that’s nothing compared to the confusion in HBO’s different streaming products.
HBO’s Twisted Journey
To recap: HBO GO was launched in 2010, and made every season of every HBO available for HBO subscribers to watch on-demand. This was massive at the time, since before then fans of The Sopranos and The Wire and Sex and the City, if they wanted the whole show, would have to either buy DVD sets, or use cumbersome cable on-demand menus.
Five years later, followed by the “Take my money, HBO” campaign, HBO Now arrived. It worked pretty much like HBO GO, except it didn’t require a subscription to HBO’s cable service. By 2015, this pretty much pitched it as a Netflix competitor.
Then, in 2020, came HBO Max, which was the full-on streaming competitor of Netflix, and arrived after AT&T bought the company, featuring HBO and a whole ton of other stuff, mostly from the Warner Brothers library. But this led to huge confusion, because HBO GO and HBO Now already existed, although the older two were eventually phased out in favor of HBO Max.
Then, in 2022, after the Warner/Discovery tie-up and the addition of Discovery content to the app, HBO became “Max,” for reasons that still make little sense. This also led to different shows being “HBO originals” and “Max originals”; Hacks is the latter.
In 2025, the overlords of WBD apparently saw the error of their ways and went back to HBO Max, including the original branding color, and even a better and easier-to-use interface than before. So all seemed fine… until the auction started, and now there’s going to be another change.
It’s not clear, at this point, when the change will take place, what the new service will be called, or what it will cost. If Netflix had succeeded in buying WBD, Netflix and HBO Max would likely have also combined, but we’ll never know I guess.
Ellison did say, per CNBC, that “HBO should stay HBO,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean its name will be in the name of the service. Paramount+, for its part, was previously known as “CBS All Access.”
As someone who follows this stuff professionally, I knew most of this from memory. But for the average casual consumer, who’s just trying to watch Industry? How will they ever even find the right tile?
