The launch of Max in Southeast Asia is a game-changer for WBD

After a strategic launch in Japan in September and a late October debut on the much smaller New Zealand market, Warner Bros, Discovery’s Max streaming platform is getting a much bigger rollout in seven more East Asian territories from Tuesday.

“Asia Pacific is probably our biggest region in terms of growth opportunities, thanks in large part to Max,” said JB Perrette, president of streaming at WBD. Variety.

In five Southeast Asian territories (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand), as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan, Max will be deployed in place of a low-tech stopgap HBO Go. That predecessor has been around since 2010 and was long ago technologically outdated by both rival services and WBD’s own Max.

Max, which emerged from the 2022 combination of Warner Bros., with its historic film studio and its HBO pay-TV service, and Discovery with its software architecture and a wealth of unscripted programming, launched in the US in May 2023. has since been rolled out to international markets including Europe and Latin America over the past 18 months.

Perrette says he would have liked to get Max to Asia faster. But he says the interval, caused by bandwidth and sequencing issues, has allowed the company to deliver a step-change product with three key upgrades for Asian consumers.

“Everywhere else, we’ve moved from HBO Max, where most of the content was shot. [Asia] is the one place where all migrations and transformations come together: the HBO originals, the Max Originals, the Hollywood ‘pay one’ films from WB, from Universal, from Paramount. Over time, we reclaim beloved franchises that have existed on other services, like “Friends,” like “Big Bang Theory” [not at launch] and ‘DC’, and adding all unscripted content from the Discovery side. So the number one upgrade is a broader, stronger, richer and deeper content offering,” said Perrette.

“In terms of the product experience, after waiting two years for the launch, the good news for Southeast Asia is that all the improvements we have made to the technology product over the last two years will be applied to the launch of the service . Perrette says. And he says there will be many more iterations to come that will take the user experience “from good to great.”

By necessity, the company is learning to adapt to local and market realities in a region as vast and culturally and economically diverse as Asia.

In Japan, Max was chosen as a branded hub within the existing streaming offering of local streaming market leader U-Next.

In Southeast Asia, Max is launching as a standalone app. But in two of them, Indonesia and the Philippines, WBD will also offer Max’s first-ever cheaper mobile plans.
Perette and WBD’s Asia Pacific president James Gibbons suggest that first mover is not always an advantageous strategy, and that WBD and Max should be able to avoid some of the mistakes that rival international streamers have made in Asia.

“I think we can avoid the pitfalls that some others have had where they’ve made the mistake of investing in a bunch of local content and it doesn’t pay off,” Perrette says.

That’s a thinly veiled swipe at Amazon Prime Video, which announced big plans to invest in Southeast Asian programming but closed that unit in January this year, and at Disney+, which opened its local version in Indonesia but halted content releases there has scaled back. . However, Netflix has already come a long way. It is a major investor in Asian content – ​​dominant in Korean shows and scaling up in both Japanese and Thai.

“If you look at that from a consumer perspective, whether or not it’s available on another partner service – obviously, if you get Max through a bundle, you’re not paying for it separately – or if the app, everyone gets Max ,” says Gibbons. “The issue of different models is a kind of business decision [based on] how to best achieve the goal of reaching every fan. And in every market, there are retail prices that are consistent across that market.”

Perrette says the idea of ​​introducing an ad-supported layer (AVOD), as has been done in the US, Canada and some international territories by Netflix and Disney+, was considered and rejected in Southeast Asia.

“We believe the advertising market is not yet mature enough for premium video to drive the economy [..] As we think about other markets, such as Australia, which has a more established market for premium video inventory [AVOD option] That may very well be the case,” says Perrette.

New Zealand, like the US, sees the retention of a linear Max channel, mainly aimed at an older audience who have not yet fully embraced the a la carte options offered by SVOV.

“Traditional media companies went through this period, shut down everything else and just let people stream. We believe that we are in the ubiquitous distribution sector,” says Perrette.
In Japan, which Perrette describes as one of the most local, content-focused markets in the world, Max had to do something “pragmatic” and different.

“We said, wait a minute, why don’t we come to market with a partner that already has a huge footprint, and the [WBD] product, the service and the content there, make sure the consumer gets used to it, understands what the brand stands for, but on a scale that we could never do on our own,” says Perrette.

Gibbons says the launch of Max’s partnership within U-Next also adds to Max’s global offering.

“The arrangement concerns the worldwide purchasing of content from Japan for Max. That’s because U-Next has partnerships with a number of broadcasters in Japan that produce a lot of dramas, and we need Japanese dramas for global service,” Gibbons said. “In the other partnerships in Southeast Asia, the partners are pay-TV operators and telecom companies [with] agreements that are more focused on the distribution of the app, rather than on a broader campus.”

WBD declines to identify which metrics – subscriber numbers, revenue, time to profitability, market share or ranking – it will use to evaluate success in Asia. But Perrette and Gibbons say that even with nine launches planned in Asia and the Pacific, they are barely halfway through the task in the region.

“We previously shared that we will be launching a direct-to-consumer Max service in Australia next year. That’s something that will be rolled out with multiple partners and it will be app-based. Australia is incredibly important to us because our content resonates so much there,” says Gibbons. Perrette identifies Australia as potentially a top three area for Max anywhere in the world. Another biggie, South Korea, “we still have to figure it out.”

That will be a crucial task in the first place, because Max will enter Korea much later than market leaders Netflix and Tving (which already host a Paramount+ hub), Disney+, which is investing heavily in Korean content, and Apple and embedded local players Wavve . and Coupang Play (Korea’s equivalent of Amazon). But also because Korean TV dramas, films and, increasingly, unscripted shows are among the most exportable genres.

“Today’s content that has the most proven travel potential is certainly Korean content, Japanese anime, as well as some Japanese dramas, and Chinese content. And when we think about prioritizing what content is going to be locally relevant, these are certainly three that we would look at and figure out a way to do something smart in one or two of those sectors,” says Perrette.

Other uncertainties and opportunities abound in the broader Asia-Pacific region. This includes how and when to launch in markets that are uncharted territory for Max or its predecessor HBO Go. Launching in lower-middle-income areas including Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and rapidly developing Vietnam, it’s not just about finding the right distribution partners. It also requires reclaiming rights licensed to other players and localizing tens of thousands of hours of WBD content.

A similar challenge could arise in India, where WBD content is currently licensed to JioCinema, the Reliance Industries giant that is in the process of gobbling up Disney India, with its powerful Disney+ Hotstar streaming and Star pay-TV platforms. A standalone Max India venture would again be a later entrant and a premium player in a highly price-sensitive market. That may not be a barrier in such a huge market, but WBD/Max could also be a useful partner for some of India’s mid-market media companies that struggle for scale but need local content and sports to provide a balanced package. to complete.

For Max in Asia, only two things are certain: “Australia is the next taxi driver,” and that the region and that, according to Perrette, “there is still a huge growth opportunity in Asia.”