All of the key updates for WarnerMedia’s HBO Max

The Game of Thrones franchise is getting a new entry on Warner Bros. Discovery’s newly-announced Max streaming service. The new prequel, called A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: the Hedge Knight, has been rumored for some time, but it wasn’t clear which part of the ample Game of Thrones lore it would borrow from.

At today’s HBO Max rebranding event, HBO head Casey Bloys confirmed that the new show has been ordered straight to series and would focus on Dunk and Egg. In the world of Game of Thrones, Dunk is a famous knight, and Egg is his squire, both of whom travel the land righting wrongs.

What’s the best streaming service? It feels like a big and important question to answer. It’s also a completely impossible, completely subjective question that depends on everything from your budget to your favorite Mission: Impossible movie. The streaming market is a teeming mass of stuff, with various platforms rising and falling, and nothing ever stays the same for very long.

But here at The Verge, we like answers. So, for this episode of The Vergecast, we decided to answer that big question the only way we know how: chaotically and at great length. So we held the first annual Vergecast Streaming Services Draft, in which our three co-hosts each drafted their top five streaming services. There were surprises from the very beginning, lots of arguments throughout, and definitely no condoning of piracy. We would never.

AT&T’s HBO Max is locking up the streaming rights for a number of popular BBC television shows, most notably the science fiction series Doctor Who.

The shows are part of a deal between the BBC and AT&T’s WarnerMedia, and will include all the current seasons of Doctor Who as well as classic shows such as The Office, Top Gear, Luther, and The Honourable Woman when it launches in the spring of 2020. HBO Max will also get a number of newer shows, like Ghosts, Home, Pure, Stath Lets Flats, and Trigonometry. The platform will also stream the upcoming 12th series of Doctor Who after it airs on BBC America in 2020.

WarnerMedia is set to launch its forthcoming streaming service, HBO Max, later this year. While the service will feature major existing shows, like Friends, the company is also beginning to develop its roster of original content for subscribers. One of those new original projects is an adaptation of Circe, Madeline Miller’s take on The Odyssey.

HBO Max gave the project an eight-episode straight-to-series order, according to Deadline (via Tor.com). Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Jurassic World writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver will write and produce the series.

AT&T plans for its upcoming streaming service, HBO Max, to eventually include a live TV element. During a call with investors today, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said that the company intends to offer live sports as part of the service, potentially including NBA, MLB, and soccer matches, and it could also include a news element. Stephenson said that the company plans to reveal HBO Max at an investor presentation on October 29th before its planned release in 2020. 

AT&T is pinning a lot of hope on HBO Max, as it again reported subscriber losses for its existing streaming service, DirecTV Now. This quarter, the service dropped another 168,000 subscribers. That’s down from the 267,000 net subscribers it lost in the first quarter of 2019. The company warned that the losses were due to continue throughout the year as the company phased out its existing promotional subscription pricing for the service. 

At San Diego Comic-Con last night, DC Universe made a slew of programming announcements for its slate of original content, including that it was renewing its live-action TV series Doom Patrol in a partnership with WarnerMedia’s forthcoming streaming service HBO Max.

WarnerMedia largely skipped San Diego Comic-Con this year, opting not to bring news or previews for some of its big projects, like Wonder Woman 1984 or Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune. Instead, DC Universe revealed that Doom Patrol’s second season will debut simultaneously on DC Universe and HBO Max sometime next year, and that HBO Max will carry the show’s first season when the platform launches next spring.

There’s HBO Go, HBO Now, and soon, there will be HBO Max. For WarnerMedia and parent company AT&T, the latter is most important, as it will become the subscription video service that they position against Netflix, Hulu, the upcoming Disney+, and a range of other paid video offerings.

“Anchored with and inspired by the legacy of HBO’s excellence and award-winning storytelling, the new service will be ‘Maximized’ with an extensive collection of exclusive original programming (Max Originals) and the best-of-the-best from WarnerMedia’s enormous portfolio of beloved brands and libraries,” the company wrote in a press release today. (The emphasis there is from WarnerMedia, of course.) So you'll get all the stuff you'd expect from having HBO — TV series, on-demand movies, watching some primetime HBO shows live — plus a huge serving of content from basically every other WarnerMedia property.

AT&T’s WarnerMedia is reportedly close to securing J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Pictures in a $500 million exclusivity deal, according to The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Times, Deadline, The Los Angeles Times, and others.

Bad Robot Pictures and Abrams, which have produced television shows under the Warner Bros. TV label since 2006, were being courted by nearly every major player in the entertainment space over the last six months. Apple, Comcast, Netflix, Sony Entertainment and Amazon all reportedly held deals with Abrams, according to the Reporter. Aspects of the deal are still uncertain — including whether or not Abrams will be allowed to direct films for competitors, which was a clause in his previous deal. That’s why he could return to direct Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker for Disney, out this year.

WarnerMedia’s upcoming streaming service has given the go-ahead to produce a series based on Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, according to a report in Variety. The series, Dune: The Sisterhood, “is told through the eyes of a mysterious order of women known as the Bene Gesserit. Given extraordinary abilities by their mastery of the body and the mind, the Bene Gesserit expertly weave through the feudal politics and intrigue of The Imperium, pursuing plans of their own that will ultimately lead them to the enigmatic planet Arrakis, known to its inhabitants as Dune.” Film director Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Blade Runner 2049) will direct the pilot episode and co-produce the series.

“The Bene Gesserit have always been fascinating to me,” Villeneuve said in a statement quoted by Variety. “Focusing a series around that powerful order of women seemed not only relevant and inspiring but a dynamic setting for the television series.”

AT&T’s WarnerMedia will launch its streaming video service in beta later this year, bundling HBO, Cinemax, and a library of Warner Bros. movies and TV. The package will cost “between $16 and $17 a month,” a strange pricing strategy, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.

Currently, HBO Go costs $14.99 a month — so AT&T’s service is basically that, with the addition of Cinemax and likely a bunch of DC Movies for up to a couple more bucks a month. WSJ reported that the service is expected to be fully up and running next March. Eventually, the service will introduce its own original programming as well, though it’s unclear how grand those ambitions are.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson confirmed today that AT&T is planning to pull WarnerMedia-owned content like Friends and ER from rival streaming services and offer it exclusively on AT&T’s upcoming streaming service.

“We are going to have to take a lot of the great content we own that’s been licensed elsewhere and bring that back into the fold,” Stephenson said at a conference in Dallas, as reported by The Dallas News.

Disney just pulled off an impressive preview of its Disney+ subscription video service. We even got a price and launch date, which is more than Apple has been willing to share about its forthcoming Apple TV Plus offering. Not to be left behind, AT&T is now planning a showcase for its own WarnerMedia service that includes HBO, according to CEO Randall Stephenson. During today’s AT&T earnings call, Stephenson said the company is planning to demonstrate the paid video service sometime in either September or October.

“We’re going to give you a detailed look at the product, and that includes the breadth of new and existing content, so just stay tuned for that. We’re making significant investments here, and we think our customers are going to love this product,” Stephenson said. AT&T recently brought on industry veteran Bob Greenblatt to lead the direct-to-consumer WarnerMedia service.

This morning, fresh off of a court victory that sealed its acquisition of Time Warner Inc. once and for all, AT&T announced wide-reaching changes to the structure of that company, now known as WarnerMedia. Robert Greenblatt, a former chairman at NBC Entertainment, has been brought on to run WarnerMedia Entertainment, a brand-new unit that folds Home Box Office, Inc. and Turner Broadcasting into one entity. Greenblatt will oversee HBO, TBS, TNT, and truTV. Equally as important, he’s also been tasked with heading up WarnerMedia’s direct-to-consumer business and the upcoming streaming service that AT&T hopes will prove a worthy foe to Netflix and kick off a new era of distribution for its robust breadth of content.

“This change will provide the company with the agility and flexibility needed to build WarnerMedia’s brands across a variety of evolving distribution models with a more coordinated approach to the company’s original programming,” WarnerMedia announced in a press release. In the company’s view, it’s breaking down walls and a siloed way of doing things that had stretched on for too long.