HBO Max has been renamed twice in six years. Now comes a merger

HBO Max has answered to three identities since it launched in May 2020, and on Wednesday its new owner promised another upheaval. David Ellison, a day after his Skydance completed the $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, told reporters on the Paramount lot that HBO Max and Paramount+ will keep running as separate apps for now, get bundled together soon, and eventually fold into a single service that has, as of this week, no name, no launch date and no price.

"Long-term, the plan is basically to bring them together," Ellison said at the press conference, in remarks reported by Geekspin. "It'll take a period of time to do that. So, I think in the immediate [term], you will see them operated separately, with things like bundling or things that you'll be able to see accelerated in the relatively short term." Pressed for specifics, he said he could not give any yet.

The company's written statement went one line further, saying its streaming products "will unify into a single service over time". Over time is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence, because the service being unified has spent six years demonstrating how long these things take, and how reversible they turn out to be.

The same app, counted in days

HBO Max launched on 27 May 2020, built around the HBO catalogue and priced as the premium option. In May 2023 Warner Bros. Discovery relaunched it as Max, folding in Discovery's reality slate and removing the most valuable brand in television from its own front door. The rollout was glitchy. The name was panned more or less on arrival, NPR noted when the company later reversed course, and reversed it was: the change back was announced at the upfronts in May 2025 and the app became HBO Max again on 9 July 2025, Variety reported, timed so the restored name was in place for the Emmy nominations six days later.

Count the days and the churn is starker than it usually gets told. The Max name lasted 778 days. The restored HBO Max name was 455 days old when Ellison stood on the lot and described the single service that will eventually supersede it. A customer who signed up in 2020 has been migrated, renamed, renamed back and is now promised one more move, and at no point in six years was the thing they were paying for, which is mostly HBO's programming, meaningfully different.

Discovery+ has outlasted every one of those decisions. It was meant to fold into the combined app in 2023, survived as the cheaper standalone service when its profitability made shutting it down look silly, and it survived again this week by going unmentioned. Nobody volunteered a plan for it. Skydance's unification statement named no services at all, which leaves the company that just promised one app still operating three.

Who the bundle is actually for

The combined group claims more than 200 million streaming subscribers, the figure Ellison reaches for when he calls the merger a genuine rival to Netflix. Some of those subscribers are the same people counted twice. Antenna, the subscription analytics firm, counted 7.6 million Americans paying for both HBO Max and Paramount+ in January, figures The Hollywood Reporter published this week: 27.9 per cent of HBO Max's US paying base also has Paramount+, and 21.1 per cent of Paramount+ subscribers also pay for HBO Max.

Those 7.6 million households are the new bundle's most reliable customers and its worst arithmetic. At the current entry prices of $8.99 for Paramount+ and $10.99 for HBO Max, per Fast Company, they already pay $19.98 a month for the pair, and a bundle only means something if it costs less than that. For the keenest users of both services, the first measurable effect of a $110 billion merger will be a discount on what they already buy. That is a strange foundation for the growth story Wall Street was sold.

There is appetite beyond them. A September survey of 2,500 American consumers by the payments firm Bango found nearly half saying they would take a bundle of the two, rising to 55 per cent among millennials, The Desk reported. Appetite was never the question.

The bundle-first, merge-later path is the one Disney walked, and it is worth being clear about what that involved. Disney sold Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ as a discounted trio for years before it put Hulu inside the Disney+ app in 2024, and even then it kept Hulu on sale as a separate service rather than forcing anyone across. The sequence worked because nothing was taken away while the plumbing was being joined. It is also a reminder of the scale question Ellison is waving at: Netflix passed 300 million subscribers before it stopped reporting the number in 2025, so a combined base of 200 million, with its double-counted households, starts this race a lap behind the company it is supposed to rival. Turning two apps, two billing systems and two content pipelines into one product is the question, and it is the job this company's predecessor did slowly, publicly and badly between 2022 and 2025.

The organisation attempting it this time starts with less room for error. Skydance is servicing debt interest that runs to roughly six times what its film studios earned last year, as we reported this week, and the streaming operation being stitched together lands with HBO's Casey Bloys after Paramount's own streaming chief, Cindy Holland, left 418 days into the job.

None of this has a date attached. Ellison put the bundle in "the relatively short term" and the single service somewhere beyond it; the last time a combined app was announced for this catalogue, in August 2022, it shipped the following May and was being unwound within two years. The two services keep their names and their prices in the meantime. Whenever the unified app does arrive, it will be the fourth product built around the HBO library in under a decade, and the first whose name nobody has yet had to apologise for.