AT&T is clearly trying to boost sign ups to there HBO Max subscriptions service but then it occurred to me that they just sold off Crunchyroll for only $1 Billion dollars. Why didn’t they just roll Crunchyroll into HBO Max? Wouldn’t that they been a better plan with the resurgence anime has had in popularity recently? I could see an argument that anime doesn’t really have the same style of content on HBO Max but you could make one subscriptions access both sites.
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Because…
No, I don’t know the real answer. That does seems weird now that you mention it.
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Ya, it feel likes like something that would be hand waved away because of branding, maybe. Like how Disney like keeping the “family friendly” and Keeps the Fox brand around for more adult targeted materials.
Because they have $159 Billion of long-term debt.
What they got from the sale is more than they would bring in through keeping it, not to mention the savings from not having those operating costs.
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Sure I get that. But AT&T wants HBO max to be the key money maker in the WB content machine. Strange plan the. To eliminate the largest collection of content and IP.
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They also did some dodgy things to DC:Universe. I think they moved existing content into HBOMax but then possibly closed down all work on those IPs and relegate DC:U to strictly be comics only. That seems like a pure cost cutting move. Just like their move with selling CrunchyRoll, to control costs.
They could have kept both DC:U and CR and combine into HBOMax trying to get more viewers into single platform, but they didn’t. I’m sure they did cost benefit analysis on both. We just don’t know what value they placed on them. Did they undervalue them? Or did they simply not bring enough benefits compared to their costs?
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I hope its that rather then what I was worried that they did that due to separate the branding of HBOMax with CR.
Okay… AT&T really needs to start thinking selling some IPs (game IPs of their DC characters, etc). The Batman game IP alone could end up being sold for 1 billion dollars.
Actually if someone like MS is truly interested, they can buy more than just the WB games section of AT&T and actually own DC comics and WB studios without sweating too much.