HBO wouldn’t win any awards for offering the most consistent streaming service. Launched as HBO Go in 2010, Time Warner shifted the name and platform host to HBO Now in 2015. When Time Warner was acquired by AT&T and renamed WarnerMedia, the streaming service became HBO Max in 2020. But it wasn’t long before AT&T sold WarnerMedia, Warner Bros. Discovery was born, and HBO Max was rebranded as simply Max. These many name changes and IT updates have not saved HBO from financial decline, and the costly rebrand has not paid off. Instead, Max saw a loss of 2.5 million subscribers over a six-month period in 2023 and a 19% decline in shares, per Fortune.
With the prestige television network wanting for money, its best option was to sell one of the most successful HBO shows to Netflix. The sale is a bit of a win-win for HBO; although it loses the exclusivity of one of its most famous shows, it also gains the potential for a newfound following in viewers who don’t have a Max subscription. Furthermore, if first-time “Sex and the City” viewers are hungry for more content, they might be driven to Max for the show’s spin-off series, “And Just Like That.”
Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO’s media parent company, first began licensing content to Netflix last year, starting with titles like “Insecure,” “Band of Brothers,” “The Pacific,” “Six Feet Under” and “Ballers,” per Variety. “Sex and the City” is by far the most popular title that Netflix has licensed from HBO yet, making this a major sale.
“We are in the business of monetizing content through windows,” Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav said on the company’s Q3 2023 earnings call, per Variety, adding that “there’s a lot of content that’s not being consumed heavily on Max, and so those are the easy ones [to license elsewhere].”