Global viewers help Max add 7 million streaming subscribers
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Global viewers help Max add 7 million streaming subscribers
The streaming service Max added 7.2 million subscribers in the third quarter, Warner Bros. Discovery announced Thursday on its earnings call. That’s the largest quarterly increase since the service launched in 2020, back when it was called HBO Max. Other streamers — including Netflix and Peacock — have also seen recent increases in subscribers.
Most of Max’s new subscribers are located outside the U.S. and Canada. And one reason they’re subscribing now is they couldn’t before.
“Until the beginning of this year, Max was a U.S.-only service, basically,” said Seth Shafer, a principal analyst at S&P Global.
He said another driver, at least for viewers in Europe, was the Summer Olympics. “If you wanted to stream Olympics coverage, Max was the place to go to,” Shafer said.
It wasn’t just superathletes bringing people in — but supervillains too.
David Arditi, author of the book “Streaming Culture,” points to the success of the Max show “The Penguin.”
“You’ve got Batman fans, you create ‘The Penguin.’ That’s going to drive a particular population to the subscription platform,” he said.
But international subscribers, on average, don’t bring in as much money to Max as viewers in the U.S. do.
Former HBO executive Charles Schreger, who teaches marketing at New York University and Fordham University, pointed out that in the third quarter, Max’s average revenue per domestic subscriber was about $12. For international subscribers, it was about $4.
“If you’re selling a streaming service in a country that has less wealth,” he said, “you offer it at a much more modest price, because that’s what the economy will absorb.”
Across the industry, companies are using different tactics to add subscribers, said Shafer at S&P Global. Netflix has grown by launching a less expensive tier that has ads. Also, it’s cracked down on password sharing.
Shafer said that’s a way other streaming services could up their subscriber numbers too.
“We all have a service or two that we’re borrowing a password to access these days. I won’t mention the one that I’m borrowing at the moment, but it’s just really common,” he said.
Shafer also said Netflix and Amazon are investing heavily in local language programming. It’s expensive, but it’s way to keep international subscribers around once they’re done watching the standard Hollywood fare.
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