WBD’s Max Sets Asian Rollout Timetable

Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max streaming service will launch in five markets in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan in the final quarter of this year and in Australia in the first half of 2025. The rollout will require multiple business models.

Max, a technologically improved platform that combines the content offerings of HBO and Discovery, has already rolled out in North America and parts of Europe and Latin America, but is only slowly arriving in the Asia-Pacific region.

It launches Wednesday in Japan, in a partnership with local Japanese streamer U-Next.

“In the coming weeks and months there will be many announcements,” said James Gibbons, president of APAC at Warner Bros. Discovery. “We will be flexible and diverse as to how we go about it. There will be a mixture of direct service and partnership models. Our goal is to reach the fan base.”

That will require direct gto consumer launches, app integration with partners and deeper partner offerings with telcos, streamers or pay-TV platforms. The Max launch in Japan sees the complete Max service offered to Japanese consumers as a branded zone within leading local streamer U-Next. It will be offered at no additional cost to U-Next users.

In Southeast Asia (including Hong Kong and Taiwan) the Max service will essentially be replacing HBO Go, a lower-tech legacy service with more limited content. In Australia, a direct-to-consumer model will launch in the first half of 2025.

Speaking at the APOS media and entertainment conference in Indonesia, on Wednesday, Gibbons was at pains to stress a local content mix.

“We take Asian content very seriously, both from a Max perspective and from a studio point of view. [Max] needs adjacency to Asian content,” said Gibbons.

Gibbons described a two-legged relationship with U-Next. “We have an arrangement where we access their Japanese content,” he said, suggesting that there will be opportunities to take U-Next’s Japanese content to global viewers beyond the current reach of the Japanese streamer.

While HBO Asia is less active as a content commissioner than it was in previous years, WBD remains a producer in the region. In Japan, it is expanding as an anime producer and as a localizer of group IP.