An interview with Warner Bros. Discovery CTO Avi Saxena and Chief Product Officer Tyler Whitworth on building Max from the ground up, new features, and more
A few weeks before Warner Bros. Discovery launches its new HBO Max/Discovery+ streaming service, Max, TechCrunch spoke … See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This interview lands between two milestones WBD had already set publicly: the Q2 2022 earnings-call commitment to merge HBO Max and Discovery+ into one US service by summer 2023, and the April 2023 official announcement of the Max name. Sitting down with the CTO and CPO weeks before the May 23 launch, TechCrunch captured the engineering rationale for the rebuild at the exact moment the company was betting its flagship brand on it.
What makes the piece worth reading now is how the bet aged: WBD launched Max with a $19.99 Ultimate tier carrying substantially more 4K than HBO Max, then within two years decided to drop the Max name and return to HBO Max. The interview is therefore a record of the product architecture that survived a rebrand built to replace it.
First-order effects
- Saxena and Whitworth are rebuilding the streaming stack from the ground up ahead of the May 23 US launch, merging HBO Max and Discovery+ subscribers onto a single app with a new three-tier structure topped by the $19.99 ad-free Ultimate plan.
- Every existing HBO Max and Discovery+ subscriber is migrated into the new product on day one, making the rebuilt app — not marketing — the immediate point of contact for the combined audience.
Second-order effects
- The $19.99 Ultimate tier establishes 4K as a paid differentiator rather than a default, pressuring rivals like Netflix and Disney+ to defend where their own premium features sit in their ladders.
- Retiring the HBO name from the service trades the brand equity AT&T leaned on when it named HBO Max — the positioning Greenblatt defended in the 2019 pricing wars over Friends — for a broader family offering, a trade whose costs surface when WBD reverses course.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, streaming consolidation proceeds as platform mergers first and brand decisions second: the merged app, unified subscriber base, and tiered pricing persist even when the name reverts, because the technical integration is harder to unwind than the label.
- The 2025 rename-back suggests brand identity in streaming is treated as reversible product packaging while the real lock-in is the rebuilt infrastructure and the bundled content catalog — a structural incentive for every media conglomerate still running multiple services to merge them under whatever name tests best.
The trend: Media companies are consolidating fragmented streaming services into single rebuilt platforms with premium tiers, discovering along the way that the underlying architecture outlasts whatever brand they wrap around it.