After a strategic launch in Japan in September and an end-of October debut within the much smaller Latest Zealand market, Warner Bros, Discovery’s Max streaming platform gets a much larger rollout in seven more East Asian territories from Tuesday.
“Asia Pacific might be our single biggest region when it comes to opportunity for growth, largely due to Max,” JB Perrette, president of streaming at WBD tells Variety.
In five Southeast Asian territories (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand) in addition to Hong Kong and Taiwan, Max will probably be switched on instead of a low-tech stopgap service HBO Go. That predecessor has operated since 2010 and was way back technologically superseded each by rival services and by WBD’s own Max.
Max, which emerged from the 2022 combination of Warner Bros., with its historic movie studio and its HBO pay-TV service, and Discovery with its software architecture and a vault of unscripted programming, began operating within the U.S. in May 2023. It has since been rolled out into international markets including Europe and Latin America through the past 18 months.
Perrette says he would really like to have been in a position to get Max moving quicker in Asia. But he argues that the interval, attributable to bandwidth and sequencing issues, has allowed the firm to deliver a step change product with three major upgrades for Asian consumers.
“In all places else we modified from HBO Max, which largely had the content ingested. [Asia] is the one place which mixes the entire migrations and transformations: the HBO originals, the Max Originals, the Hollywood ‘pay one’ movies from WB, from Universal, from Paramount. Over time, we’re reclaiming core beloved franchises which have existed on other services, like ‘Friends,’ like ‘Big Bang Theory’ [not at launch] and ‘DC,’ and adding all of the unscripted content from the Discovery side. So, primary upgrade is a broader, stronger, richer, deeper content offering,” Perrette said.
“On the product experience side, the excellent news for Southeast Asia, having had to attend two years to launch, is that each one the improvements we’ve made within the technological product during the last two years come native to the service once we launch,” Perrette says. And he says there are various more iterations that may take the user experience “from good to great” yet to return.
By necessity, the corporate is learning to adapt to local and market realities in a region as vast and culturally and economically diverse as Asia.
In Japan, the route taken was to deliver Max as a branded hub inside the prevailing streaming offering of local streaming market leader U-Next.
In Southeast Asia, Max is being launched as a standalone app. But in two of those, Indonesia and The Philippines, WBD can even offer Max’s first ever lower-cost, mobile-only subscription plans.
Perette and WBD’s Asia Pacific president James Gibbons suggest that first mover is just not all the time an advantageous strategy, and that WBD and Max should give you the chance to avoid among the mistakes that rival international streamers have made in Asia.
“I believe we’re going to give you the chance to avoid the pitfalls that some others have had, where they’ve made the error of investing in a ton of local content and it not paying off,” says Perrette.
That could be a barely disguised swipe at Amazon Prime Video, which announced grand plans to take a position in Southeast Asian programming, but shuttered that unit in January this 12 months, and at Disney+, which opened its local iteration in Indonesia, but has reined back content spend there. Netflix, nevertheless, is much up the road already. It’s a serious investor in Asian content – dominant in Korean shows and scaling up in each Japanese and Thai.
“Checked out that from a consumer perspective, whether or not it’s available on one other partner service – obviously, for those who’re getting Max through a bundle, then you definately’re not paying individually for it – or because the app, everyone’s getting Max,” says Gibbons. “The problem of the several models is a kind of business decision [based on] best achieve the goal of reaching every fan. And in each market, there may be retail pricing that’s consistent across that market.”
Perrette says that the thought of introducing an advertising-supported tier (AVOD), as has been done within the U.S., Canada and a few international territories by Netflix and Disney+, was considered and rejected in Southeast Asia.
“We don’t think the promoting market is mature enough yet for premium video to make the economics work [..] As we expect of other markets, like Australia, which has a more established premium video inventory market, that [AVOD option] can be quite much the case,” says Perrette.
Latest Zealand, just like the U.S., sees the retention of a linear Max channel, essentially geared toward older audiences which haven’t yet fully-embraced the a la carte options that SVOV offers.
“Traditional media corporations, went through this era of like, shut every thing else off and just make people go to streaming. Our view is, we’re in the ever present distribution business,” says Perrette.
In Japan, which Perrette describes as amongst essentially the most local content-oriented markets worldwide, Max needed to do something “pragmatic” and different.
“We said, wait a second, why don’t we come to market with a partner that already has an enormous footprint, seed the [WBD] product, the service and the content there, get the patron used to it, understanding what the brand represents, but at a scale that we could never do on our own,” Perrette says.
Gibbons says that Max’s partnership launch inside U-Next also adds to Max’s global offering.
“The arrangement is about sourcing content from Japan for Max globally. That’s because U-Next has partnerships with a bunch of broadcasters in Japan who produce numerous dramas, and we want Japanese dramas for the service globally,” says Gibbons. “In the opposite partnerships in Southeast Asia, partners are pay TV operators and telcos [with] agreements more focused on distribution of the app, than a broader campus.”
Courtesy of Discovery
WBD declines to discover what metrics it can use – subscriber numbers, revenues, time to profitability, market share, or rating – it can use to guage success in Asia. But Perrette and Gibbons say that, even with nine Asia-Pacific launches now notched, they’re barely half-way through the duty within the region.
“We now have previously shared that we’ll be launching an Australia direct-to-consumer Max service next 12 months. That’s something which will probably be rolling out with multiple partners and it can be app-based. Australia is incredibly essential for us, because our content is so resonant there,” says Gibbons. Perrette identifies Australia as potentially a top three territory for Max anywhere on the earth. One other biggie, South Korea, “we still should work out.”
That will probably be an important task, first, because Max will enter Korea far later than market leaders Netflix and Tving (which already hosts a Paramount+ hub), Disney+, which is investing heavily in Korean content, in addition to Apple and embedded local players Wavve and Coupang Play (Korea’s equivalent of Amazon). But, also, because Korean TV drama, movies and, increasingly, unscripted shows are amongst most exportable genres.
“The content today that has essentially the most proven travel-ability is definitely Korean content, Japanese anime, in addition to among the Japanese dramas, and Chinese content. And, naturally, as we take into consideration prioritizing what content will probably be relevant locally, those are definitely three that we’d start and work out a option to do something smart in a single or two of those sectors,” says Perrette.
Other uncertainties and opportunities abound in the broader Asia-Pacific region. Amongst these are how and when to launch in markets that are virgin territories for Max or predecessor HBO Go. Launching in low-middle income territories, including Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and fast-developing Vietnam, will involve not only finding the best distribution partners. It can also require clawing back rights which were licensed to other players and localizing tens of 1000’s of hours of WBD content.
An analogous challenge may present itself in India, where WBD content is currently licensed to JioCinema, the Reliance Industries-owned behemoth that’s within the processing of swallowing Disney India, with its powerhouse Disney+ Hotstar streaming and Star pay-TV platforms. A standalone Max India operation would again be a later entrant and a premium player in a highly price-sensitive market. That needn’t be a hinderance in such an enormous market, but WBD / Max could also make a useful partner for a few of India’s mid-sized media operations that are struggling for scale but have local content and sports to round out a balanced bundle.
Only two things are certain for Max in Asia: “Australia’s the following cab off the rank,” and that the region and that, per Perrette, there “an enormous growth opportunity in Asia still to return.”
WBD
