The first massive wave of content removal for HBO Max and Discovery+ began on Aug 17 and continued until Aug 21.
The removals come in wake of changes going on at Warner Bros. Discovery, to cut back on costs, mainly for tax write-offs costing the company $825 million.
Not only tons of titles were purged off HBO Max and Discovery+, Discovery announced that around 70 employees were laid off, “due to changes in the reality programming department.”
The list included over 55 titles, with many of them coming from the animation sections.
Shows such as Infinity Train, Close Enough, Generation, Summer Camp Island, The Not-Too-Late Show with Elmo and 200+ episodes of Sesame Street among many other titles.
Initially, the titles were set to leave the service the following week, however, they were all removed the night of. By Friday, all of the programming on the list was gone.
These aren’t the first pieces of programming that have been getting removed, as it’s been going on since June.
Shows like Final Space, The Last O.G, and Chad among others without notice.
Earlier in the month, 6 Max originals movies were quietly removed in wake of Zaslav’s comments on HBO Max movies and return profits.
While many of these programs are likely to be written off for losses, a lot of the removals have to do with combined service featuring content from both HBO Max and Discovery+ set to come out next year.
A spokesperson resenting HBO Max said, “As we work toward bringing our content catalogs under one platform, we will be making changes to the content offering available on both HBO Max and Discovery+.”
However, another possible reason why HBO is cutting all of these shows is to declutter, as CNBC calls it, where they remove the less-viewed shows and compared the clutter to Netflix.
Another possible shift that HBO wanted to do is to move away from kids shows like Elmo and Sesame Street for example.
Shows like Little Ellen have a complete season ready and yet it’s not coming out. It also falls in line with what happened to Scoob: Holiday Haunt and Batgirl.
Warner Brothers look to launch their merger of Discovery+ and HBO Max in 2023.
