With a big question looming over HBO's distribution in the UK, Germany and Italy with Warner Bros. Discovery With the global rollout of Max, WBD's JB Perrette floated a potential new partner in the regions: Amazon.
Longtime HBO distributor, Sky, could stay in business with WBD, Perrett said during an appearance at the Wells Fargo TMT Summit, echoing comments last spring by international president Gerhard Zeller. However, the streaming and gaming CEO said: “There are also great alternatives. Amazon is a great company in those markets, and they are certainly keen to be more aggressive in that space.”
Sky's deals to carry HBO content on its systems in key markets are set to expire in about a year. WBD has said it intends to launch Max there by 2026. Like all relationships between programmers and distributors, the relationship between WBD and Sky has come under increasing scrutiny during the broadcast era due to how different its customer acquisition and retention dynamics are from those in linear TV.
The UK, Germany and Italy dilemma has been present since the launch of HBO Max in 2020, when the service was operated by AT&T-owned WarnerMedia. Since HBO's origins in the 1970s, the network has grown as an exponent of the pay-TV package, which was sold wholesale by its owners and marketed to consumers by distributors such as Sky in Europe. Technology now allows streaming services to bypass those traditional routes to the customer, but in recent years, companies like WBD have struggled to confront the high cost of acquiring and maintaining subscribers on their own.
By launching the Max in dozens of global regions, the company has “a lot of proof points” on how the company “can manage both… [direct-to-consumer] presence and a [distribution] Partner presence. …The same could apply to Skye. The satellite operator has a “large installed base” of subscribers, “and our content is important to them,” Perrett added.
Ultimately, Perret said, “time will tell” the strategic path the parties will take, as discussions continue. “In the old model, you would have to pull all your content from Sky and just go direct to consumer,” Perrett noted. “That's not necessarily the case, especially when they have such a large, established base that includes a lot of our fans. There are very collaborative ways we can By working together, we have proven that we are capable of doing so.
