HBO Max hikes subscription price as it deletes content

CEO: So customers subscribe to our service for the content and because it’s a reasonable price.
Aide: Yes sir.
CEO: So how about we delete a bunch of the content and raise the price, that’ll increase our profits, right?
Aide: You are a genius sir.

DAalseth said:

CEO: So customers subscribe to our service for the content and because it’s a reasonable price.
Aide: Yes sir.
CEO: So how about we delete a bunch of the content and raise the price, that’ll increase our profits, right?
Aide: You are a genius sir.

Everything goes up, not down. You can’t buy a five pound bag of sugar at the grocery store these days, the bag is only four pounds now and the price still went up. Making snarky comments does nothing to correct that. Companies know they need a certain profit margin in order to keep the lights on and they will do what they have to to keep the lights on, end of story. As a customer you have absolutely no right to the price you find acceptable. Your only weapon is your power to not pay the price and go without the product. HBO is not a human right, not a life sustaining necessity, it’s entertainment, period. 

Sorry to go batshit crazy but HBO and the rest of them will or will not reap what they sow. All I know right now is that cord cutting is turning out not to be the price savior it was touted to be. I still have a cable subscription that includes HBO and Showtime and can stream using the HBO Max and Showtime apps at no additional charge.

Timing of this seems odd. The new-ish owners of HBO, a company called Warner Brothers Discovery, are launching a new streaming platform this spring, widely rumored to be called Max, which will put the content from HBO, Discovery+ and Warner Brothers (DC comics titles, etc) under one roof, sort of the way Disney+ has merged their various brands, channels and franchises. So why jack up HBO Max by a buck now when it will be part of a new service in a few months, presumably with a different pricing structure. Maybe it will be a la carte pricing, and you can continue to just subscribe to HBO? But strange to have a service that doesn't give you everything it offers for one price. 

lkrupp said:

DAalseth said:

CEO: So customers subscribe to our service for the content and because it’s a reasonable price.
Aide: Yes sir.
CEO: So how about we delete a bunch of the content and raise the price, that’ll increase our profits, right?
Aide: You are a genius sir.

Everything goes up, not down. You can’t buy a five pound bag of sugar at the grocery store these days, the bag is only four pounds now and the price still went up. Making snarky comments does nothing to correct that. Companies know they need a certain profit margin in order to keep the lights on and they will do what they have to to keep the lights on, end of story. As a customer you have absolutely no right to the price you find acceptable. Your only weapon is your power to not pay the price and go without the product. HBO is not a human right, not a life sustaining necessity, it’s entertainment, period. 

Sorry to go batshit crazy but HBO and the rest of them will or will not reap what they sow. All I know right now is that cord cutting is turning out not to be the price savior it was touted to be. I still have a cable subscription that includes HBO and Showtime and can stream using the HBO Max and Showtime apps at no additional charge.

No making snarky comments won’t fix it. But the point of satire is to point out the fools in powerful positions. I think they will reap what they sow. A lot of the cuts, even actual deletions of old classic programs for tax reasons will come back to haunt them. They may gain a bit of a tax advantage for the moment by taking a write off, but down the road they will look around and realize they could have made a lot of money by reissuing these old programs, that literally will not cost them a penny to store. They would have made a lot more money than they will in the short run by scrapping them. The BBC and other old networks have discovered that, look at the millions they bring in by reselling things like Eastenders, and Dr. Who, and Last of the Summer Wine from forty, fifty, even sixty years ago. That’s free money they are throwing away in the pursuit of a one quarter bounce from a tax write off. But then the people running them at the moment are 20th century MBAs who look to their own golden parachutes, and bonuses and don’t give a damn about what’s good for the company or society long term.  
It’s called being penny-wise and pound foolish.
And eventually the people who inherit these companies will wonder why the hell they made these decisions.
That’s what my snarky comments were calling out. 

HBO has an annual price, I wonder if that has gone up too. After decades of having HBO, through cable and lately via streaming, I canceled it this month. The programming choices, especially removing content so they don’t have to pay creators and their estates. The one that really broke the back for me was removing Beforeigners. WTF. I’ll probably get the annual when we come back, maybe do every other year.