HBO Max is coming back

HBO became HBO Max became Max. Now, it will be HBO Max once more.

Warner Bros. Discovery is renaming its streaming platform again starting this summer, restoring a name it ditched just two years ago. The company announced the rebranding Wednesday during its upfront presentation in New York.

The change comes as Warner Bros. Discovery seeks to scale back its volume of content and focus on quality programming and storytelling.

“The powerful growth we have seen in our global streaming service is built around the quality of our programming,” said David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, in a statement. “Today, we are bringing back HBO, the brand that represents the highest quality in media, to further accelerate that growth in the years ahead.”

The company’s streaming business has turned around its profitability by almost $3 billion in the last two years and scaled globally with around 22 million subscribers added in the last year. Warner Bros. Discovery aims to have more than 150 million subscribers by the end of 2026.

Still, Warner Bros. Discovery lost live rights to National Basketball Association games beginning next season. And the company has focused on paying down debt rather than spending on new content to compete with Netflix, which has more than 300 million subscribers.

Ironically, the HBO Max branding was first introduced in 2019 to showcase HBO’s competitive global streaming ambitions. Now, WBD is bringing back the same name, but emphasizing the opposite — quality over quantity.

“We will continue to focus on what makes us unique – not everything for everyone in a household, but something distinct and great for adults and families,” said JB Perrette, president and CEO of streaming at Warner Bros. Discovery, in a statement. “It’s really not subjective, not even controversial – our programming just hits different.”

Competitor Disney has taken a similar tack, with CEO Bob Iger noting in recent investor calls that the way to win in streaming will be quality content.

The legacy media companies have all struggled to achieve profitability in their streaming businesses since launching their own services in recent years. That’s led to an increased emphasis on advertising tiers, crack downs on password sharing and more streaming service bundles.

The Upfronts week in New York has already been heavy on naming news. ESPN announced its upcoming flagship streaming app will be named simply ESPN. Fox said its forthcoming streamer will be named Fox One. And, last week, Comcast’s cable portfolio spinoff announced its new holding company name, Versant.

Warner Bros. Discovery first launched its standalone streaming service HBO Max in 2020 when the brand was still owned by AT&T. The “Max” moniker was added to signify that the platform would have a wide array of content, from reality TV, documentaries, kids programming and movies, as well as the prestige branding of HBO titles.

At the time, leadership believed that HBO had too small of an audience, much of which was U.S.-based, and that there was more value in making HBO a sub-brand within a larger streaming offering.

The service was later renamed Max in 2023. That change came after the merging of Discovery Communications and WarnerMedia, which was divested from AT&T in 2022. Content from Discovery+ was added to HBO Max under the new name.

Now, two years later, Warner Bros. Discovery has reversed course.

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of CNBC. Versant will be the new parent company of CNBC under the proposed cable portfolio spinoff.