Gunnar Wiedenfels, chief financial officer at Warner Bros. Discovery said more streamers will follow HBO Max in cutting its content after years of overspending on new shows and movies.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Wiedenfels called the recent layoffs and cancellations “a reflection of an industry that has gone overboard, gone into a spending frenzy,” while speaking at the conference. She said the company “has rectified a lot of this content exuberance, as I would call it. There’s been a lot of thinking about, you know, we’re doing more and more and more, not necessarily ‘doing exactly the right things, doing what works.'”
Streaming services and overspending
“We are emerging from an irrational period of overspending with very limited focus on return on investment,” Wiedenfels said, promising that the company has “shut down” and predicting that “others will have to make some adjustments that frankly are behind us now.”
The company recently had to write off between $2.8 billion and $3.5 billion in content and development costs. “[Nós] we trimmed a lot of the excess last year and I think that’s something everyone else in the industry will pass on,” Wiedenfels added.
The CFO stressed, however, that HBO Max remains committed to bringing new content to its subscribers: “We have every intention of continuing to spend, content is the lifeblood of this company. Obviously it’s a hit and run deal, you win a little, you lose a little. But if you look at the creative background that [o CEO e presidente da Warner Bros.] david [Zaslav] was able to assemble, this is the first flight line of creative talent”.
Wiedenfels also predicted further increases in subscription prices, saying “there’s no question that these products are very cheaply priced. The idea of shrinking seven windows into one and selling it as cheaply as possible doesn’t seem like a very smart strategy. And I think there was this land grabbing phase partially fueled by the capital market and you couldn’t lose enough money and you couldn’t grow subscriber numbers fast enough. I think this is the other way around. If you look at the trend lines over the past 20 or 36 months, a number of traders have gradually started to raise prices. So I think there is a growing consensus that this phase of price dumping is over.”
The past year has been a turbulent one for many streaming services. The Walt Disney Company had its worst year since 1974, with high streaming spending being a major factor. Netflix lost subscribers for the first time in company history. Even Netflix and Warner had trouble working together.
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Featured photo: Kaspars Grinvalds/Shutterstock
The Warner Bros. CFO post believes more streams will follow the HBO Max cuts that first appeared in Olhar Digital.
Source: Olhar Digital

Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.