The HBO Max Playbook: Bringing sports, entertainment, and streaming together

0:05David Gibbs:Hello and welcome back to the next episode of Streamtime Sports. My name is Chris Dunn and I'm the community lead. This week we're taking a deep dive into one of the biggest shifts happening in sports media today. The convergence of premium sport entertainment and streaming under a single platform. At our recent SportsProLondon event, we had the opportunity to hear from David Gibbs, the senior vice president of sports product at Warner Brothers Discovery, to unpack the strategy behind the UK launch of HBO Max and what it means for the future of sports viewing. To understand why this conversation matters, it's worth taking a step back first.

0:33David Gibbs:Over the past decade, viewers have been pulled across an increasingly fragmented streaming landscape. Warner Brothers Discovery itself has operated multiple services and brands across different markets, including Discovery +, Eurosport Player, BT Sport, TNT Sports, and now HBO Max. Following the Warner Media and Discovery merger, the company's challenge became clear. How do you bring world-class entertainment, premium sport, and factual content together in a way that makes sense for the consumers? The latest HBO Max launch is the company's answer to that, and there's few people better placed to discuss that transformation than David.

1:05David Gibbs:Before joining Warner Brothers Discoveries, he spent many years at Sky and Comcast, helping shape some of the UK's most important digital and streaming products, including SkyGo, SkyGlass, and SkyStream. Today, he leads sports product innovation for one of the world's largest streaming businesses, overseeing experiences that serve millions of viewers across dozens of markets and languages. In this conversation, David explains how Warner Brothers Discovery is combining live sport entertainment and personalized streaming into a single proposition. He talks about delivering more than 35 ,000 live events annually, the lessons they learned from this year's Olympics, and why features such as multi-view, key moments, personalized recommendations, and AI-driven experiences are becoming central to how fans consume sports.

1:43David Gibbs:What makes this interview particularly interesting is that it's not really a discussion about technology for technology's sake. It's a conversation about fan behavior. How do you help viewers find the moments that matter? How do you make massive events like the Olympic Games easier to navigate? And as streaming becomes more personalized, how do you preserve the shared live moments that make sports so powerful in the first place? If you're interested in the future of sports broadcasts, streaming strategy, product innovation, or simply hearing where live sports and an increasingly digital media ecosystem, this is a conversation you'll want to hear.

2:16David Gibbs:So from here, I'll hand things over for our conversation with David Gibbs from Warner Brothers Discovery.

2:28Hi, everyone. Hi, great to be here. I'm Greg. I'm Dave Gibbs. We're going to get straight stuck into this. David, I'll ask you first and foremost about the UK launch of HBO Max, particularly given that Warner Brothers Discovery has had a somewhat fragmented streaming landscape over the years. You've been on a journey. Eurosport, TMT Sports, Discovery +, HBO. So bring that together under HBO Max. What has that journey been like as a business? So it's been a kind of messy journey, I think. We are at heart, Warner Brothers at heart is a legacy media brand, right? Everyone knows Warner Brothers. and we've kind of built our streaming proposition from a variety of launches strategic launches big bets um m &a and and really hbo max is is solves the problem that we kind of created ourselves in the industry created because as we fragmented the customers had lots more choice so you know we've had Dplay, D +, Eurosport Player, BT Sport, TNT, HBO Max, Max, back to HBO Max.

3:50And really, if you're a, you know, you're a customer and Warner Bros. is a family brand, right? So, you know, if you're a customer and you wanted to watch House of Dragons, you were going to HBO Max or Sky. If you wanted to watch the Premier League, you were going to BT Sport. If you wanted to watch the Olympics, you were going to Eurosport. If you wanted to watch Nightly Day Fiancé, you were going to Discovery Plus, which makes absolutely no sense for a customer when they're being asked to subscribe to all of these other services as well as they begin to cut the cord so what we've done over time um which really culminated in our uk launch uh over the last couple of weeks is really bring all of that together in one place one single destination that really solves the problem for the customer it also solves a problem for us as a business so that we only have to support one platform one login one brand one identity but ultimately this was really about bringing all of that amazing content together in one place personalizing it for the customer one destination one choice that they have to make yeah and I guess with that comes scale right I mean I you know I can imagine that scale is something that that is particularly important and what does what does scale kind of really mean for you you know in terms of markets content breadth and ambition particularly like how are you defining success at this stage yeah i mean scale for us so we are you know our ambition is to be a top three global streamer so we have 130 million subscribers currently we're in 100 markets 40 different languages um yeah our ambition is to get to 150 and i think if you look at it from a sports perspective what does scale mean you know we have different sports propositions in different markets we're a global sports brand we have tnt in the us we have tnt in latam we have tnt in the uk we have eurosport in um 40-yard european territories so our ambition there is is different depending on what market we're in and the proposition that we have to the customer but if you think about that a product at a platform level, which is my job.

6:00You know, scale for us means, you know, we will deliver over 35 ,000 live events this year. 35 ,000 live events, 40-odd languages, 100 different markets. But that is what scale means to us from a product perspective as well as a customer perspective. Wow, and I guess that scale was really kind of realised with the Winter Olympics. That felt like a real moment for the platform, record-breaking engagement I understand and from your perspective like why did that resonate so strongly on HBO Max and kind of how does that differ from traditional broadcast experiences and maybe you can talk to us about that yeah so I mean I've been doing this a long time and I see Carlo down here and like none of none of what we're doing is new like this isn't really you know traditional broadcast experiences and we've been doing stuff for 20 odd years where we've been trying to do different things and i think finally what we're seeing now is the technology catching up with the audience like and i think we really are a tipping point now where there is an expectation from a streaming audience that is different than they've previously um experienced so i think you know the olympic games is a is an amazing event to work on and from a product perspective is um It's a very interesting challenge.

7:23You know, you essentially have three sets of customers. You have casual fans who come in and they might like things like curling. They don't really like curling, but they like it for a week. You have super fans who may be, you know, downhill skiing fans. They may be fans of luge and who really want to go deep into an experience. and then you have just general sports fans who want to experience the whole thing and find those best events so you know streaming allows you to escape from the epg it allows us to say to a customer you can watch every single moment on max whether you want to watch the third leg of you know for paris for example you want to watch small ball rifle shooting you can spend all day watching small ball rifle shooting if you want to catch the best of the olympics we will curate and provide you with the best if you want to go deep into an event and you want to scrub back for every single moment that's happened we'll provide that to you as well and that is what streaming allows us to do it allows us to offer that choice to the customer and it worked really well for us you know we saw 3x the number of viewing subscribers that we had with Beijing Winter Olympics in 22 um we uh we had triple digit growth in our hours of consumption like it was a very successful event for us and one that we were really able to showcase the best of max not only the olympic games but all of the other content that appears on max as well so in terms of that showcase then i think you might have uh some yeah content to help we're gonna just play a video in the background which just kind of just gives you an idea of the experience that we brought um together for the Olympic Games.

9:06So the challenge we had, right, was like, how do you allow all of this content to shine amongst all of this other content that exists on Macs? You know, there is a finite amount of space. If we bring everything together, there is a finite amount of space that we can offer our customers to consume the Olympics at the same time as consuming all of this other pretty strong content that you have. So hero on the homepage, you know, you are left in no doubt that the Olympic Games is happening. Dedicated destination, dedicated lens on max that allows us to really showcase all of those live events that are happening now, that are happening in the future.

9:46So when a customer comes to us, really they're in three different modes, right? It's what's happened, what's happening, and then what's going to happen. And the challenge we had was really building the experience that allows us to do that and building experience that didn't just work for one set of customers you know we are in multiple markets multiple languages multiple local heroes that our team want to um want to showcase and that's yeah that's an interesting challenge and what literally you can see here we don't have any audio if you had the audio you would hear the commentators changing language um as we go down and then really for us like it's you know how do you then start to you know really build on the benefit of the the connected platform so how do you make sure that yeah if our promise is you aren't going to miss a moment of the olympic games how do we make sure that that happens so key moments is the big one right so what it allows you to do scrub forward scrub back find those big moments that happened jump in jump out and we're keeping the customer and the user in the story so you're really talking about fan engagement different sorts of fans different sorts of markets different languages but you're also catering as well you talked about the different content sets that are on your platform so how do you how do you kind of uh what are the key things you're optimizing for when thinking about the fan yeah and with respect to different content types and yeah i mean it's those three use cases like what's happened what's happening what's going to happen and live is the it's the live is the key is the the core of that right people come to us for those live moments now how do we make sure that you just don't miss them right if we've got you know we had up in paris we up to 50 concurrent events that is very hard for a customer to stay of course so things like gold medal alerts yeah there's an event happening here where gold medal is about to happen you can switch in you can watch you can come back to where you were it's all about trying to keep the fan in the story and give them the give them the tools that allow them to watch in as many ways as possible we should have multi-view coming up here as well right multi-view is something that's been around for some time you know and it's something that you know we struggle to get engagement with but again finally the tech has caught up with the audience and the audience has really embraced this.

12:12So we saw over a third of our Olympics users use Multiview during the Winter Games. And they're using it for two reasons. One is, I want to keep across four things at once. But again, when you saw that discovery experience we've got and how do we make sure that we can bring all of that content into the four, then this is a really useful navigation tool. So what we're seeing is customers moving from sport to sport to sport and then coming back again. And as we said, it's all about keeping you in that story. So behind this incredible product experience, this delivering value to fans and real great experiences, there must be an amazing amount of technology innovation happening.

12:56So things like AI personalization must feature heavily in how you deliver these experiences. So can you talk to us a little bit about how that technology is now helping shape that user experience and that outcome? Yeah, so I think, so if we talk about it at a platform level, you know, 35 ,000 live events streamed globally, multiple languages, multiple formats, multiple devices, like that's our number one, right? How do we make sure that the customer, if they're moving to the streaming experience solely, has confidence in us that it's going to work straight away and it's going to work first time?

13:37Secondly, if we're trying to bring all of that content alive alongside all of that amazing entertainment content, how do you personalise it? How do you make it relevant for you? How do we make sure that you don't miss one of those moments? So really, if we talk about AI, it's doing two jobs for us. At the customer level, really, it's about personalisation and how do we collect more signals about our customers viewing behaviour to make sure that we are putting the right content in front of them at the right time. So if you're a sports fan, your experience will be more sports led. If you don't want to watch sports in the household, then sports will be less figured in the UI.

14:15So really it's about how do we continue to evolve and personalize that experience? How do we make it easier for you to find the content that you like? And then kind of in the background, from a product perspective, what we're seeing now is the ability to test and automate and prototype at speed that we've never seen before. So I think there is a big push there just in the efficiency and how we improve this. And then really around like imagery. So, again, all of these markets require different images in different formats that are going to work. Some aren't. So how does the machine help us? One, collect, curate, format and present the images.

14:56And secondly, how does the machine help us make sure that we are putting the right image in front of the customer at the right time and then adapting for us? And then finally, retention. right so so our our core sort of kpis is minutes per user and distinct streaming days so if i can get you watching more i'm coming back more often you get more value out of the service and you are less likely to leave so how do we start to be more predictive in in the ways that customer behave to make sure that we are continually driving those metrics which means we're going to lose less customers yeah it makes sense so i suppose that links the technology to the business objectives the business outcome so thinking about the business side of things uh of the business side of streaming let's say with all this opportunity all of these this data where does this go long term with regards to the balance between streaming direct consumer traditional broadcast advertising targeted advertising what what does the sustainable kind of future for delivering these consumer experiences look like?

16:02Yeah, look, I think each market is different depending on the content we have and the way that that market is structured. You know, Chris, some of the stuff that he said, there are distinct differences in markets, but, you know, I'd see our future as a hybrid future, right? There are many ways to buy HBO Max Direct. There are many ways to access HBO Max through our partnerships with, you know, this market with Amazon and with Sky. there are ad models there are the ability to pay without ads so i i see that as very much a a hybrid model going forward and and just really adapting that to the demand of the customer and just the changing nature of the customer and their behavior yeah so so think just just asking another question then i guess about the business model um can you is the technology really really driving the the the proven return on investment and the proven uh kind of demonstrated value of of of a streaming business model so how do you mean i'm not quite sure i guess i want to dig into a little bit maybe like the the you mentioned the metrics and something and so can you you can now presumably with all the data you've got you can you can point to a product change and show a direct link between that and a business app?

17:21You can. So there are lots and lots of tools and those tools are becoming easier that allow us to predict whether a customer is going to stay or go. But ultimately it's about the content and our job is to get that customer to watch Game of Thrones, to watch the Premier League, to watch the Champions League. That's our job and they're paying a premium price for premium content. So our job is to make sure that that content shines and we take away any friction that stops them accessing it. And I think that's, you know, it's a combination of the product and the tools that we've got and then the content that we've got available.

17:58So I guess one final question, which is linked to content and linked to kind of fan experience. We've heard this, I mean, as a sports fan, I kind of think about this myself. As these experiences get more personalized, data-driven, do you feel, and do the business feel, there's a risk of fans losing shared cultural moments that make big sporting events so special. And how do you kind of think about that trade-off? Yeah, so I think about it as a professional and a sports fan. So I think what you saw there is our ability to really showcase these sports and bring them alive with the imagery, with the video, with the navigation.

18:41You can be left in no doubt that the Olympics was on. so I don't feel you know whilst we personalize it I think personalization is the sort of last mile you know it's the right content the right alert the right match the right key moment and the right content for you to watch next but I think from a from a live perspective you know there aren't many surprises in life now right and I think I think Nick made a point yesterday about you know is is non-live going to be worth more than live well none of that non-live stuff exists if the live product is not as good as it can be. And I think any of you who watched, if you watched the Munich PSG game the other night, if you watch York v Rochdale on Saturday, they are moments that you can't take away.

19:27And I just feel that for me, sports is the last kind of bastion of spontaneity and unpredictability and all of that kind of stuff. And without it, there's nothing else. so I for me you know I think from a sports fan's perspective you know live is still the thing that drives everything and I think from product perspective you know for us live is the premium product and our job is to showcase the best of that and then get you to watch more so you come for Liverpool and you stay for Dragons well it's a great way to end thank you very much Dave and thanks for sharing all your insights and and letting us see what you're doing with HBMX

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