Q&A with WarnerMedia's Bob Greenblatt on why AT&T named its streaming service HBO Max, price wars over shows like Friends, and pitching streaming to NBC in 2015
Lacey Rose / Hollywood Reporter :
Context & Ripple Effects
This Q&A lands weeks after AT&T's WarnerMedia revealed the HBO Max name for its spring 2020 service, built around exclusive rights to Friends — a show Netflix had just re-licensed for $100M to keep through 2019, up from $30M a year. Greenblatt, who pitched streaming to NBC back in 2015 before landing at WarnerMedia, is here defending both decisions: why lead with the HBO brand, and why pay up for catalog.
The interview reads differently in hindsight. The $4B launch bet paid off slowly — only about 30% of HBO subscribers had even activated Max access by late 2020 — and by 2023 Warner Bros. Discovery dropped the HBO branding entirely for Max, making this Q&A a snapshot of the naming logic that was later reversed.
First-order effects
- Greenblatt's defense of the HBO Max name puts the premium HBO brand at the center of AT&T's positioning against Netflix and Disney+, while the Friends exclusivity turns a single sitcom into the service's headline differentiator.
Second-order effects
- Netflix's tripled Friends renewal price signals what happens when a top licensor becomes a competitor: every WarnerMedia title coming off third-party platforms gets repriced or pulled, forcing Netflix to spend more for less catalog.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, legacy studios systematically withdraw licensed content from Netflix to stock their own services — fragmenting the market and making original-slate spending, not library depth, the durable competitive moat.
The trend: Content owners are repricing and recalling their libraries from Netflix to fuel proprietary platforms, with brand strategy — HBO Max then, Max later — still unsettled along the way.