Today Warner Bros. Discovery reported its 1st quarter 2023 earnings. In that report, they announced that they added 1.6 million subscribers to HBO Max, bringing the number of total subscribers to 97.6 million. The downside is they lost $1.07 billion in just three months.
“It is an important time for Warner Bros. Discovery. We’ve come through some major restructurings and have repositioned our businesses with greater precision and focus. And we see a number of positive proof points emerging, with DTC perhaps the most prominent. We made a meaningful turn this quarter with $50 million in segment EBITDA and 1.6 million net adds, and we feel great about the trajectory we are on. In fact, we now expect our U.S. DTC business to be profitable for 2023 – a year ahead of our guidance. Even in today’s challenging marketplace, we are positioned to drive free cash flow and deleverage our balance sheet, and we remain confident in our strategy and ability to achieve our financial targets.” Said David Zaslav.
This all comes as Warner Bros. Discovery has been working hard to prepare for the transition from HBO Max to the new Max streaming service later this month.
To help cut costs recently, Warner Bros. Discovery has been cutting staff, cutting shows, and even sol a majority control of The CW. This all comes as the company still gets its hands around the merger of Warner Bros. and Discovery.
The question now is will all of these changes that Warner Bros. Discovery have been making are over or will we see more major cuts to come later in 2023? The transition from HBO Max to Max will be important to the future of Warner Bros Discovery. For now, we will have to wait and see how that plays out.
For now, the leadership at Warner Bros. Discovery seems to be very confident in their strategy to address how cord cutting is changing the world of entertainment.