Gunnar Wiedenfels, chief financial officer of Warner Bros. Discovery, gave some pointers on Tuesday as to how the entertainment giant envisions relaunching its streaming services next year under one major platform: the launch of the service, something like the Food Network. Don’t expect the name Marquee to disappear. ,
Wiedenfels told investors at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia+ Technology conference in San Francisco that the company has no plans to come up with generic verticals within the streaming platform that dump content into a bucket separating movies from reality programming. Instead, WBD will leverage all brand names to keep consumers happy – and fuel the growth of streaming customers internationally where some television content is already broadcast on linear television.
No, he didn’t provide any details about what chief executive David Zaslav is thinking about a name for the combined streaming service that will rival Netflix and Disney+ in terms of size and reach. But now it looks like the name “Discovery” will play a major role when a combined HBO Max and Discovery+ launch in the US as a single service next summer.
“We have all these household names that are known internationally,” Wiedenfels said. “We’ll talk more about the specific strategy later. We have these brands very valuable, and I think there is a lot to be achieved given that these very powerful names are established in the market.”
more to come…