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HBO and Max Marketing Team Hit With Layoffs
Warner Bros. Discovery’s cuts are in the double digits, a person familiar with the matter tells TheWrap
The latest downsizing for the media giant comes after the company shed 1.8 million DTC subscribers during its second quarter of 2023 for a total of 95.8 million globally.
The direct to consumer division, which executives have said is on track to be profitable in the U.S. by the end of the year, reported an adjusted EBITDA loss of $3 million during the quarter, a $555 million year-over-year improvement.
Looking ahead, Warner Bros. Discovery said it expects to generate cash flow in the “$1.7 billion ballpark” in the third quarter and $4.5 billion to $5 billion for full year 2023. The forecast assumes cash restructuring and integration-related costs of roughly $1.2 billion for 2023.
The company expects adjusted EBITDA for the year to settle towards the low end of its target range of $11 billion to $11.5 billion. In the DTC segment, WBD expects EBITDA losses of “no more than a couple hundred million dollars” for full year 2023.
Warner Bros. Discovery has cut staff from its marketing team for HBO and Max.
A person familiar with the matter told TheWrap that the layoffs are in the double digits, though a specific figure was not made available. Representatives for HBO and Max declined to comment.
The cuts to HBO and Max’s marketing department come after WBD previously laid off 70 HBO Max employees in August 2022, with cuts at the time affecting HBO Max Originals Nonfiction and Live Action, International Originals, Casting and Content Acquisitions.
Other areas within WBD that have recently been hit by layoffs include its corporate communications and PR teams, as well as its cable news, legal and production divisions.
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...As things get more competitive and the market saturates, streaming companies (like the cable giants before them) have increasingly found new, annoying ways to please Wall Street. That usually involves layoffs, customer service cuts, and price hikes, but also making the underlying product worse (see: Time Warner Discovery) while imposing ever greater restrictions (see the Disney and Netflix push to crack down on password sharing).
The problem for streaming giants is they’re imposing these sometime bi-annual rate hikes and new restrictions at the same time that they’re running out of new content thanks to the writers’ strike and these companies’ refusal to pay their creatives a living wage:
“[Disney] is asking more and more of the customer . . . while the amount of new content on offer will likely decline,” said analysts at media consultancy Enders, who warned of “a negative spiral and real consequences” if the strike drags on. “Lack of fresh content, particularly for Disney+, will increase churn,” they added.
Streaming Providers Dead Set On Becoming The Shitty Traditional Cable TV Companies They Once Disrupted
from the meet-the-new-boss dept
from the meet-the-new-boss deptEvery few months a media outlet will get a staffer to write an inane story about how if you subscribe to every streaming service in existence, you’ll unsurprisingly wind up paying almost as much as you’d pay for cable TV. The underlying message is usually that we haven’t actually made real progress and that gosh, you probably should have just stuck with your old cable TV subscription...
.jfif)
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