Warner Bros. Discovery Ignores Writers Strike During Earnings Call

As the Writers Guild of America strike enters its fourth day and dominates media headlines, news of the event was conspicuously absent from Warner Bros. Discovery’s first quarter earnings call this morning.

No executive on the call mentioned the strike or the picket lines that have sprung up on both coasts. And during the question and answer portion, no analyst asked a question about the stoppage.

That’s a big contrast to Paramount’s earnings call yesterday, where CEO Bob Bakish observed there is a “pretty big gap” between the studios and the WGA in negotiations, with the company preparing to settle in for a long strike.

Instead of commenting on the strike, CEO David Zaslav heavily focused on the company’s streaming operation, which he described as “no longer bleeding.” According to the CEO, the streaming business will be profitable by the end of 2023 in the U.S.—a year ahead of schedule.

The company’s streaming posted $50 million in profit, a turnaround from consecutive quarters of losses, including a $217 million drop to end last year. Though streaming turned a profit, the company lost $1.1 billion overall.

“We feel great about the trajectory we are on,” said Zaslav, describing the quarter as a “meaningful turn.”

Ahead of the May 23 (re)launch of Max—the company’s new combined HBO Max and Discovery+ offering—the DTC business added 1.6 million global subscribers to reach 97.6 million.

Significant growth drivers included the success of The Last of Us and the final season of Succession.

Zaslav also noted that WBD is “actively working” on adding news and sports to Max over time.

With upfront week coming in mid-May, Zaslav pointed to the company’s ad-supported platforms, sports portfolio and news slate as major selling points.

News, in particular, will play a role in the upfront.

“With the presidential cycle kicking off, we anticipate real growth out of CNN, and we’ll be selling heavily into the upfront for town halls, primaries and conventions,” said Zaslav.

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.