HBO Max is in search of its Baby Yoda phenom

HBO maxThe start in the US on Wednesday after months of hype marks the arrival of another monolithic streaming service. There will be a huge catalog of blockbuster films and TV hits – including superheroes. It will try to seduce you with exclusive originals on a large budget. And one of these shows will try to pull your heart with an adorable doll.

Sounds familiar?

HBO max, from AT & T.‘s WarnerMediais one of the last participants in the Streaming Wars, a seven-month window in which media giants and technology giants release a number of new streaming services for Netflix. These competitive battles – rookie newbies like HBO Max, Disney Plus and NBCUniversal’s Peacock against heavyweights like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video – have caused large companies to spend hundreds of millions of dollars hoping to shape the future of television.

The rivalries also affect you: they affect how many services you have to pay for and how much you need to stream your favorite shows and movies, especially since more of these programs are blocked by different programs players.

HBO Max arrives after Disney Plus kills its entry into the arena. Equipped with a catalog of box office films and a surprise phenomenon in Baby Yoda from the inexpensive original The Mandalorian, Disney Plus set a gold standard. A media analyst called it “one of the greatest product launches ever”. Even the CEO of Netflix tapped his hat and described the launch of Disney Plus as “stunning”.

“In over 20 years of observing various established companies such as Blockbuster and Walmart and all of these companies, I have never seen such a good execution by the established company that learned and mastered the new path,” said Reed Hastings in last month. “My hat is away from them.”

This is a difficult task for HBO Max. However, big differences between HBO Max and Disney Plus mean that they have very different challenges and strengths at the start.

The level of difficulty is increased by the service that is started in the middle of a pandemic that has already turned standards around the world.

An integrated customer base

In just over a day after the November 12 rollout, Disney Plus registered over 10 million registrations. Within six months, the number of subscribers had risen to over 50 million.

But unlike Disney Plus, HBO Max doesn’t start from scratch. Max enters the game with some big stats that are already on his side: For about 10 million electricity HBO Subscribers who are billed directly by AT&T, WarnerMedia or HBO are available to HBO Max at no additional cost. And HBO Max has offers for millions more HBO subscribers to get the same free upgrade from offers with pay TV providers and other platforms.

With every streaming with HBO Now, the company’s existing independent service, the HBO Now app is automatically switched to the HBO Max app on Wednesday morning by a software update.

With these factors, HBO Max could reach or exceed the Disney Plus milestone by closing 10 million accounts instantly. This immediate influx of Max members will not change the net number of HBO customers, but they will represent millions of people trying the service and possibly sparking interest in word of mouth.

Netflix – the market leader – has more than 182 million subscribers worldwide.

The increasing number of services increases the feeling of subscription fatigue. The launch of HBO Max follows that of Apple TV Plus, Disney Plus, a limited version of Peacock and Quibi from NBC. The vast majority of People only subscribe to one to three paid streaming servicesAccording to a Nielsen study earlier this year. Each new service creates a different competitor for one of these coveted places. However, as the streaming service options expand, users show no signs of withdrawal: 93% say they will either increase or maintain their existing streaming subscriptions.

However, this study did not take into account how people would feel after the U.S. workforce cut nearly 40 million jobs last month.

Puppetry a hit

Neither Disney nor HBO Max were able to advertise a level of Netflix-like original programming at launch. HBO Max will have six original titles on the first day, including a comedy series called Love Life with Anna Kendrick and a piece in late-night talk show format with the 3-year-old red monster Elmo from Sesame Street. The first episode of this Not Too Late Show with Elmo can already be viewed on YouTube for free to arouse interest.

Disney Plus didn’t have much more originals than HBO Max at the start – there were about eight. But the boss among them was The Mandalorian, the highly anticipated Star Wars spinoff series. The Mandalorian has checked many boxes – he has a mega-budget production with cost per episode in the same area as Game of Thrones. It was also the first time that the Star Wars universe was brought to a live action series.

But his secret weapon was really a secret. The child, the pint-sized doll known to the world as Baby Yoda, was kept under lock and key so that Disney refrained from gold mine toys and plush sales and protected the character from all marketing materials and a pipeline for commodity production. Everything to keep Baby Yoda’s great revelation.

It worked. Baby Yoda became a pop culture phenomenon and The Mandalorian became one of the most visited shows.

It is always possible for HBO Max to trigger an original programming surprise that attracts attention at the start. But based on early reviews of its originals pre-published for critics, the HBO Max startlist as we know it today doesn’t seem to have a cultural bomb waiting to go off.

The free first episode of Elmos The not too late show has had 115,000 views on Monday since it was posted on YouTube four days ago. The Mandalorian’s trailer However, YouTube had more than 7 million views in the first four days after its release. The Trailer of HBO Max’s love life on YouTube reached about half that number – but it took over a month.

Coronavirus complications

Of course, Disney Plus also benefited from an eye-catching marketing machine. Almost every arm of Disney’s huge device was in the weeks before Disney Plus started and even placed advertising material in the Disney Resort hotel rooms.

When it comes to marketing, HBO and WarnerMedia are no slouch either. And HBO Max certainly has the advantage of popular franchise companies with integrated fandoms: DC, Game of Thrones and Friends, to name just a few.

But HBO Max comes when many of the typical advertising levers – unusual premieres on the red carpet, huge billboards, lively fan activations – come through Corona virus Pandemic and global barriers are said to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus.

With people across the country stuck talking at home without live sports, new blockbuster films, or any kind of theater or concert crowd entertainment, Coronavirus has set up lockdown streaming services even greater demand.

However, these locks not only hampered HBO Max’s interest in the pre-launch service, but also disrupted the programming pipeline. The day Google searched for HBO Max the most was February 22nd. Why? At this point, HBO Max announced a Friends Reunion Special.

The special is now on hold indefinitely. You can’t shoot if social distancing is still the norm.

Disney Plus, on the other hand, was Google’s most popular search term last year. And although the search interest in Disney Plus peaked (many times) on the start day, November 12, there was still a much higher search interest in the days before Disney Plus started than HBO Max generated before tomorrow’s rollout Has.

The above graphic shows the US search interest for HBO Max in blue and Disney Plus in red, which dates four weeks before Disney Plus starts until Friday. This was the latest date on which Google Trends provided this type of historical search data at the time of publication.

The huge red thorn? This is the start day of Disney Plus and sets the high water mark by which the rest of the search interest is measured. That almost flat blue line that’s at the bottom? In comparison, that’s interest in HBO Max. It’s not the most beautiful picture.

However, the most important data on the search popularity of HBO Max could still be available today, one day before the start. Before going into these details, you can get an idea of ​​the relative interest in HBO Max versus Disney Plus by comparing it to Netflix. For years, Netflix has been the world’s dominant streaming service and a popular benchmark for the competition.

Two days before launch, Disney Plus’s search interest was about a third of Netflix’s search interest. However, two days before the launch of HBO Max, search interest was only 5% of Netflix’s.

And that’s math that even a 3 year old red monster can understand.