WarnerMedia CEO John Stankey Says Disney+ Is ‘Not That Deep’ – But HBO Max Will Be

Stankey pinch-hit for a sick Randall Stephenson at Tuesday’s UBS conference

WarnerMedia CEO John Stankey, pinch-hitting for AT&T chief Randall Stephenson, told the UBS Global TMT Conference audience Tuesday why  his boss’ HBO Max service will be superior to Disney+.

“Disney+, it’s a good product, they’ve done a nice job. It has a particular appeal,” Stankey said. “The strongest appeal of Disney+ is to the youth of the family. Its strength of a product to satisfy the other members of the familyit’s not that deep. There’s some stuff that’s interesting to adults in the offer and there’s some stuff that’s probably interesting your 20-something and 30-something-year-old members of the family, but it’s not that deep in that regard.”

“Max is,” he continued. “Max is a product that appeals to the entire family, and the family wireless plan. And it’s something that everybody in the family looks at and says, ‘That has something in it for me.’”

In terms of that wireless plan thing, Stankey was talking about how the AT&T/HBO Max partnership makes even more sense for their umbrella company than Verizon’s and Disney’s joint offer does. After all, WarnerMedia (and thus, HBO and HBO Max) parent company AT&T gets the direct benefit for any bundle the cellular company does with its own SVOD service. The free-for-one-year deal Verizon and Disney+ came up with has to be split among two different companies.

Anyway, back to Stankey talking about why HBO Max as a content provider is superior to Disney+, which he says is “about half the content of what we have at half the price.”

“You’d be hard-pressed to suggest that Disney+ is a replacement service for Netflix,” Stankey said. “I’d be hard-pressed to say that Disney+ is a replacement service for Max.”

HBO Max is set to roll out in May 2020 at a cost of $15 per month.

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