Max’s priorities

When HBO Max becomes Max in a few weeks, the company hopes to make the transition as seamless as possible, including keeping pricing steady and moving watch histories over to the new platform.

But when it comes to measuring the success of the new streamer, JB Perrette, president and CEO of global streaming and games at WBD, has a few priorities.

“In the very near term, migration success is one key metric,” said Perrette.

Over time, three further metrics include brand awareness, customer satisfaction and engagement.

“As that flywheel continues, we obviously want to see subscriber growth and scale as an additional metric,” Perrette added.

Reducing churn is another major hope for Max, with Zaslav noting that churn on Discovery+ is quite low, whereas it’s the opposite for HBO Max.

“Driving that churn is as or maybe more important than driving the growth,” said Zaslav.

When Perrette pointed out HBO Max had been seeing record low churn for this year, Zaslav twice interrupted the streaming CEO to say the churn is “still high” and in “an unacceptable range.”

To reduce churn, Zaslav said that the more people that use a streaming service within a family, the more engaged people are. (Interestingly, that’s the opposite of Netflix’s approach to cracking down on password sharing.)

Zaslav also said that WBD now has a technology advantage to reach consumers the company previously had not been able to.