Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Audio / Video
  3. News

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Discovery+ reportedly won’t be killed off

By

The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, today reports that Warner Bros. Discovery has changed plans to completely merge the Discovery+ streaming service with HBO Max and instead will allow the former to live on as a separate subscription.

Official details about the new service remain extremely scarce, including what it’ll be called. But it’s still in the works, and WSJ says that the plan is for Discovery+ to remain as a lower-cost option with less content. The new service would include Discovery content alongside HBO content, plus more from the greater Warner Bros. catalog, and is expected to be available later this year.

Discovery+ app icon on Apple TV homescreen.

From the WSJ story: “The decision to keep Discovery+ is part of an effort to avoid risking losing a significant chunk of the app’s 20 million subscribers who might not want to pay the higher price to access that content, according to the people familiar with the matter.”

Recommended Videos

So instead of one new service to rule them all, it’ll be one new service to rule them all, as well as Discovery+. No word yet on how pricing will suss out, either. Currently, Discovery+ is $5 a month with ads, or $7 a month without. HBO Max costs $10 a month with ads and $16 a month without. Those HBO Max prices reflect the first increase in the history of the service.

Related

If that all sounds a little confusing, it is, born from the drama of AT&T owning Warner Bros. and creating WarnerMedia, then offloading it into this new Warner Bros. Discovery entity, with new executives and new strategies, but a more unified tech platform. The changes also have led to a veritable bloodbath of content, with upcoming shows and movies being killed before ever being seen, current shows getting the axe, and other on-demand fare being removed from the platform altogether.

And to leave no revenue stone unturned, the WSJ report also says that Warner Bros. Discovery is working on a free ad-supported service (that’s known as FAST, in industry parlance) a la Tubi or The Roku Channel that would scoop up even more eyeballs. Complicating that a little maybe Warner Bros. Discovery just signed a deal with Tubi that adds 14 Warner Bros.-branded channels and more than 2,000 hours of movies and shows to the Fox-owned Tubi, including some HBO series that were removed from the service, including Westworld, Raised by Wolves, The Nevers, and more.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Phil Nickinson
Phil Nickinson
Section Editor, Audio/Video
Phil spent the 2000s making newspapers with the Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal, the 2010s with Android Central and then the…
Combined HBO Max/Discovery+ streaming service to launch in summer 2023
HBO Max and Discovery+ app icons.

We're finally starting to get a little clarity about what the future looks like for HBO Max and Discovery, which now fall under the same roof, causing a bit of a shockwave in the entertainment industry not just from the platform side, but more recently by taking a pretty heavy hatchet to shows and movies.

During Thursday's second-quarter earnings call, executives of the new Warner Bros. Discovery said to expect the launch of a new service that combines HBO Max and Discovery+ in the summer of 2023. The United States is up first, with 39 counties in Latin America to follow later in the year. Europe will launch in 2024 — though that doesn't currently include the U.K. and Germany, followed by Asia-Pacific and new markets later in that year. It's possible that some markets may see an accelerated rollout, however.

Read more
CNN+ is shutting down two days earlier than it first said
CNN Plus as seen on the CNN website.

You know things are broken on the corporate side of things when even the execution gets moved up. CNN+ will cease streaming on April 28, according to an email sent do subscribers. That's two days sooner than was previously announced.

This, of course, is the definition of a moot point. Whether CNN+ dies on April 28 or April 30 doesn't matter at all — it'll be just as dead. But it just goes to show the dysfunction behind the scenes following the merger of WarnerMedia, which owned CNN, with Discovery, and the executive shake-up that followed.

Read more
CNN+ will shut down April 30 after just one month
CNN app on a television.

Nuclear weapons experts have a phrase: "Bouncing the rubble." It's what happens when you use more firepower than what's needed to actually kill a thing. At some point, you're just blowing up things that already have been blown up. And that's where we're at just minutes after Variety broke the news that already was pretty likely — CNN+ is being killed after about a month of life. The New York Times reported that the end date is set for April 30.

CNN's Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy confirmed the news in a story ... on CNN.

Read more