iWorld
HBO Max and Discovery+ to merge into single streaming platform by 2023
Mumbai: On a second-quarter earnings call on Thursday, Warner Bros. Discovery announced the merger of HBO Max and Discovery+. The media conglomerate set a timeline for integrating the two services.
According to Warner Bros. Discovery CEO and president of global streaming and interactive JB Perrette, who spoke on the company’s Q2 earnings call, HBO Max and Discovery+ will launch in the United States as a single service in the summer of 2023. “At the end of the day, putting all the content together was the only way we saw to make this a viable business,” he said.
Bringing HBO Max and Discovery+ together is aimed at cutting churn, so “there’s something for everyone in the household,” he added. WBD did not reveal the new brand name for the combined service, nor did executives discuss pricing for the unified stream.
According to Perrette, Warner Bros. Discovery is initially focused on the ad-supported and ad-free versions of the combined HBO Max-Discovery+ but is also “exploring how to reach customers in the free, ad-supported space” with content that is distinct from what is available on premium VOD services.
He added that HBO may or may not be included in the name of the unified direct-to-consumer WBD platform; Perrette stated that the company is conducting consumer research on the HBO Max name. “HBO will always be the beacon and the ultimate brand that stands for television quality.”
The combined HBO Max-Discovery+ service, according to Perrette, will combine the best features of both services. According to him, HBO Max has performance and customer issues but offers a rich set of features, whereas Discovery+ has fewer features but a more robust underlying delivery capability.
Following the launch of the unified HBO Max-Discovery+ platform in the United States in summer 2023, WBD plans to bring the platform to Latin America in the fall of 2023, Europe in early 2024, Asia-Pacific in mid-2024, and other markets in the fall of 2024.
WBD’s HBO Max, HBO, and Discovery+ subscribers reached 92.1 million in the second quarter, up 1.7 million from the previous quarter’s 90.4 million. On a pro-forma basis, this is a 22 per cent increase of $75.8 million over the previous year.
WBD expects to have 130 million global streaming subscribers by 2025 and to generate one billion dollars in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation from its direct-to-consumer businesses (Ebitda). He shared that the company’s Ebidta losses in the streaming division are expected to peak in 2022, with a long-term margin potential of 20 per cent or higher.
Currently, HBO Max costs $14.99 per month without ads and $9.99 per month with ads in the United States. Discovery+ costs $6.99 per month without ads and $4.99 per month with ads.
The company, on 17 May 2021, announced its plans to merge its two flagship streaming platforms, HBO Max from the legacy WarnerMedia (spun off from AT&T) and Discovery+. CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels broadly sketched out a strategy to combine the streamers in March 2022, ahead of the close of the deal forming Warner Bros. Discovery, saying that it would initially sell the pair as a bundle before fully integrating them.
The merged HBO Max-Discovery+ streaming platform will combine thousands of hours of programming spanning scripted, reality, and documentary content and will resemble a mini-cable TV bundle.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
