HBO Max and Discovery Plus will merge into one app

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

When the merger of Discovery and WarnerMedia closes, the two companies will experience a merger of their own. The CFO of Discovery confirmed the move when speaking at the 30th Annual Media, Internet, and Telecom Conference on Monday.

This was the first glimpse of the company's content plan. The streaming app situation was given a very loose plan byWiedenfels. There will be some options before the two apps combine. Disney often bundles Disney Plus, Disney Streaming, and Disney TV. At some point, the two will be combined into one massive and unwieldy product.

I say unwieldy because despite being a service I watch every day, it is buggy. If you try to navigate to a show from Apple's Up Next feature, you have to restart the app. If you just choose a show to watch in the app, it will restart or crash. Good luck if you want to watch something soon. The app crashed multiple times during the premiere of the autobiographical stage musical when people tried to find out how mad her sister was at her. She was very angry.

You would think that it would have figured out how to handle the mad rush to watch a season finale after it broke during multiple premiere and finales of Game of thrones. If more than 12 people tune in at the same time, the show will crash. It probably takes more than 12 people trying to watch a stream at the same time. This is a technological cockup that should have been resolved a long time ago.

It is not clear which part of the new company will be in charge of designing the app. It is not clear how much the new app will cost. Discovery Plus and HBO Max both have ad-supported tiers, with Discovery Plus going for $4.99 a month and $6.99 a month, and HBO Max going for $9.99 a month and $14.99 a month. If the new company mashes prices together as it mashes apps and content, it would mean a service going for about $21 a month. Depending on the number of screens and the quality of the streams, the price of the service varies from $9.99 to $19.99 a month. The best-looking app in the streaming business is offered by the company. If the DiscoHBO app wants to charge more, it will need more than the next season of Euphoria.

I am not sure the new company understands this. The presentation was mostly about content and not the quality of the app. He said that we have a premium, male-skewing positioning on the Discovery side. He was excited about seeing the combined metrics because he thought they would make for a great product.

If people can't watch it because the app is buggy, the merging of content will not be as appealing.