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 . 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That predecessor has operated since 2010 and was long ago technologically superseded both by rival services and by WBD’s own Max.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.