Why the Launch of Max in Southeast Asia Is a Game-Changer in Warner Bros. Discovery’s Biggest Target Market
After a strategic launch in Japan in September and an end-of October debut in the much smaller New Zealand market, Warner Bros, Discovery’s Max streaming platform gets a much bigger rollout in seven more East Asian territories from Tuesday.
“Asia Pacific is probably our single biggest region in terms of opportunity for growth, largely because of Max,” JB Perrette, president of streaming at WBD tells Variety.
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In five Southeast Asian territories (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand) as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan, Max will be switched on in place of a low-tech stopgap service HBO Go. That predecessor has operated since 2010 and was long ago technologically superseded both by rival services and by WBD’s own Max.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 in 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 like to have been able to get Max moving quicker in Asia. But he argues that the interval, caused by bandwidth and sequencing issues, has allowed the firm to deliver a step change product with three major upgrades for Asian consumers.
“Everywhere else we changed from HBO Max, which largely had the content ingested. [Asia] is the one place which combines all of the 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 that have existed on other services, like ‘Friends,’ like ‘Big Bang Theory’ [not at launch] and ‘DC,’ and adding all the unscripted content from the Discovery side. So, number one upgrade is a broader, stronger, richer, deeper content offering,” Perrette said.
“On the product experience side, the good news for Southeast Asia, having had to wait two years to launch, is that all the improvements we’ve made in the technological product over the last two years come native to the service when we launch,” Perrette says. And he says there are many more iterations that will take the user experience “from good to great” yet to come.
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, the route taken was to deliver Max as a branded hub within the existing 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 will also be offering Max’s first ever lower-cost, mobile-only subscription 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’re going to be able to avoid the pitfalls that some others have had, where they’ve made the mistake of investing in a ton of local content and it not paying off,” says Perrette.
That is a barely disguised swipe at Amazon Prime Video, which announced grand plans to invest in Southeast Asian programming, but shuttered that unit in January this year, and at Disney+, which opened its local iteration in Indonesia, but has reined back content spend there. Netflix, however, is far up the road already. It is a major investor in Asian content – dominant in Korean shows and scaling up in both Japanese and Thai.
“Looked at that from a consumer point of view, whether or not it’s available on another partner service – obviously, if you’re getting Max through a bundle, then you’re not paying separately for it – or as the app, everyone’s getting Max,” says Gibbons. “The issue of the different models is a sort of business decision [based on] how to best achieve the goal of reaching every fan. And in each market, there is retail pricing that’s consistent across that market.”
Perrette says that the idea of introducing an advertising-supported tier (AVOD), as has been done in the U.S., Canada and some international territories by Netflix and Disney+, was considered and rejected in Southeast Asia.
“We don’t think the advertising market is mature enough yet for premium video to make the economics work [..] As we think of other markets, like Australia, which has a more established premium video inventory market, that [AVOD option] may be very much the case,” says Perrette.
New Zealand, like the U.S., sees the retention of a linear Max channel, essentially aimed at older audiences which have not yet fully-embraced the a la carte options that SVOV offers.
“Traditional media companies, went through this period of like, shut everything else off and just make people go to streaming. Our view is, we’re in the ubiquitous distribution business,” says Perrette.
In Japan, which Perrette describes as among the most local content-oriented markets worldwide, Max had to do something “pragmatic” and different.
“We said, wait a second, why don’t we come to market with a partner that already has a huge footprint, seed the [WBD] product, the service and the content there, get the consumer 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 within 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 a lot of dramas, and we need Japanese dramas for the service globally,” says Gibbons. “In the other partnerships in Southeast Asia, partners are pay TV operators and telcos [with] agreements more focused on distribution of the app, than a broader campus.”
WBD declines to identify what metrics it will use – subscriber numbers, revenues, time to profitability, market share, or ranking – it will use to evaluate success in Asia. But Perrette and Gibbons say that, even with nine Asia-Pacific launches now notched, they are barely half-way through the task in the region.
“We have previously shared that we’ll be launching an Australia direct-to-consumer Max service next year. That’s something which will be rolling out with multiple partners and it will be app-based. Australia is incredibly important for us, because our content is so resonant there,” says Gibbons. Perrette identifies Australia as potentially a top three territory for Max anywhere in the world. Another biggie, South Korea, “we still have to figure out.”
That will be a crucial 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, as well as Apple and embedded local players Wavve and Coupang Play (Korea’s equivalent of Amazon). But, also, because Korean TV drama, films and, increasingly, unscripted shows are among most exportable genres.
“The content today that has the most proven travel-ability is certainly Korean content, Japanese anime, as well as some of the Japanese dramas, and Chinese content. And, naturally, as we think about prioritizing what content will be relevant locally, those are certainly three that we’d start looking 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 wider Asia-Pacific region. Among these are how and when to launch in markets which 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 just finding the right distribution partners. It will also require clawing back rights that have been licensed to other players and localizing tens of thousands of hours of WBD content.
A similar challenge may present itself in India, where WBD content is currently licensed to JioCinema, the Reliance Industries-owned behemoth that is in 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 need not be a hinderance in such a vast market, but WBD / Max could also make a useful partner for some of India’s mid-sized media operations which 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 next cab off the rank,” and that the region and that, per Perrette, there “a huge growth opportunity in Asia still to come.”
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