WarnerMedia Launching Direct To Consumer Streaming Service Next Year

During his address at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in Los Angeles, WarnerMedia CEO John Stankey announced plans to launch a direct to consumer streaming service in late 2019.

Stankey explained that the streaming service will be more expensive than HBO’s current over-the-top subscription plan, though a final price will not be determined until the platform comes to market. HBO will front the new platform with additional content coming from Warner Media brands that will be bundled around the premium cable service. John Stankey made the following statement:

“Today we announced plans to launch a new direct-to-consumer streaming service in the fourth quarter of 2019. This is another benefit of the AT&T/Time Warner merger, and we are committed to launching a compelling and competitive product that will serve as a complement to our existing businesses and help us to expand our reach by offering a new choice for entertainment with the WarnerMedia collection of films, television series, libraries, documentaries and animation loved by consumers around the world. We expect to create such a compelling product that it will help distributors increase consumer penetration of their current packages and help us successfully reach more customers.”

Stankey added that the content spend at WarnerMedia would be “competitive” to Netflix’s and AT&T addressed the cost of launching a streaming platform in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing:

“We expect financial support to launch this product to come from a combination of incremental efficiencies within the WarnerMedia operations, consolidating resources from sub-scale D2C efforts, fallow library content, and technology reuse. We expect to defer some licensing revenues to later periods in the form of increased customer subscription revenues.”

What are your thoughts on WarnerMedia’s plans? Will you spend the extra cash on yet another streaming service? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!

Source: Variety