{"id":50655,"date":"2025-08-07T15:11:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T15:11:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/50655\/"},"modified":"2025-08-07T15:11:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T15:11:07","slug":"hbo-maxs-australia-debut-makes-wbd-bosses-bullish-on-euro-launches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/50655\/","title":{"rendered":"HBO Max’s Australia Debut Makes WBD Bosses “Bullish” On Euro Launches"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tHBO Max<\/a>\u2018s early growth in Australia is fuelling belief among Warner Bros Discovery (WBD)\u2019s management about the crucial upcoming launches in the UK, Germany and Italy.<\/p>\n

\n\tWBD added 3.4 million subscribers for the second quarter to reach 125.7 million overall, with a whopping 3.2 million of those from international markets, earnings<\/a> results showed today. The launch of HBO Max in Australia in March was described in comments as \u201cvery successful,\u201d with \u201chealthy retail traction\u201d combining with a carriage partnership with local pay-TV player Foxtel. <\/p>\n

\n\tKantar stats from end-July suggested HBO Max had gained around 400,000 subs since launch (20% of all new subs), accounting for around 5% of the country\u2019s streaming market.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe hope is similar scenarios will play out in the three European territories, where HBO content has traditionally gone out through pay-TV service Sky. HBO Max launches in the UK\/Ireland, Germany and Italy in early 2026, with WBD CEO and President David Zaslav pointing to the \u201cembedded audience\u201d during an investors call for Q2.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere are some markets where people have been watching The Last of Us, Euphoria, The White Lotus and House of the Dragon on a different platform,\u201d he said. \u201cNow it\u2019s going to move to HBO Max. In that case, we have a hugely engaged population who will be spending a lot more time watching. We\u2019re seeing that in Australia.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe added HBO Max was \u201cgetting very powerful pull-through in terms of demand in the UK, Germany and Italy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tJB Perrette, WBD\u2019s President of Global Streaming and Games, provided further context on the Australian launch, where it\u2019s fair to say some market watchers believed debuting a full decade after the likes of Netflix could hamper its performance. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe love that double track of fishing in a pond that\u2019s already stocked with our partners and at the same time going direct,\u201d he said. \u201cAustralia has been a great success story for us in these early months and has exceeded our expectations. This makes us even more bullish in what we expect to see at the beginning of next year in the European markets.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWBD\u2019s revenue for the quarter was flat at $9.8 billion, in line with forecasts. The company\u2019s net income for the three months ended in June was $1.58 billion, up from a massive loss pushing $10 billion the year before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HBO Max\u2018s early growth in Australia is fuelling belief among Warner Bros Discovery (WBD)\u2019s management about the crucial…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":50656,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[64,63,8551,134,17300,427,6142],"class_list":{"0":"post-50655","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-earnings","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-hbo-max","13":"tag-tv","14":"tag-warner-bros-discovery"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50655\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}