Last March, following the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery Inc., the newly-formed Warner Bros. Discovery announced its intentions to combine the HBO Max and Discovery Plus streamers into a single service. Nearly a year later, a report from The Wall Street Journal suggests that those plans have changed and that Discovery Plus will live on.
Discovery Plus isn’t going anywhere
According to the Journal’s sources, Warner Bros. Discovery is still planning to launch a “supersize streaming service” in the near future. The service will feature all of the HBO Max content and most of the content that can currently be found on Discovery Plus. Nevertheless, Discovery Plus will still be available as a standalone option for consumers.
The sources claim that WBD doesn’t want to risk losing the 20 million Discovery Plus subscribers that may not be interested in paying more for a combined offering. Therefore, the new service and Discovery Plus will share some content, including Discovery Channel’s Shark Week block and TV shows from Chip and Joanna Gaines’ Magnolia Network.
Discovery Plus costs $4.99 a month with ads and $6.99 a month without ads. Meanwhile, HBO Max with ads is $9.99 a month, but WBD recently hiked the price of the ad-free plan up to $15.99 a month. WBD executives have made it clear that their combined service (which is still unnamed) will likely be more expensive than HBO Max once it launches.
Speaking of the service’s name, Twitter users recently discovered a private account they suspect might be connected to the company. The account is named WBD+ (@wbdplus) and its bio reads: “All in one.” The account has zero followers and its tweets are protected, but there’s a chance that this could be the name of the upcoming streaming service.
Or it could be a troll with too much time on their hands.
