👉 Background: While Warner Bros Discovery (the owner of HBO) launched its Max streaming service in the US in 2019, it flagged the launch in Australia back in September last year. That was when it warned Foxtel it would be yoinking its popular shows away — like Game of Thrones, The Last of Us, and The White Lotus (...where absolutely NOTHING has happened so far in Season 4).

‍👉 What happened: Now, Warner Bros Discovery has confirmed that Max will be launching in Australia on the 31st of March with a number of tiers, including Max Basic - the ad-supported tier. There's nothing quite like a tense House of the Dragon battle scene interrupted by an ad for dishwashing liquid.

‍👉 What else: Max won't need to have a sales team on the ground to source local ads because Warner Bros Discovery has partnered with Nine Entertainment who will sell the ads, for HBO / Warner Bros Discovery. And as a result, Nine will will take a cut from the ads it sells on behalf of Max. Selling another network’s ad space is a new source of revenue for Nine — but possibly it won’t be for too long.

What's the key learning?

💡When a business is building out a new feature, there’s one key dilemma: do we build things in-house? Or do we outsource it to the professionals?

💡While Warner Bros Discovery won’t have quite as much control over Nine's new ads system, it means they can learn from a local partner who already knows what they’re doing. Nine has been selling ads for squillions of years. And with those insights, Max could potentially build out its own sales function and ad platform later on.

💡This is exactly the same path that Netflix took when it launched its own ad-supported model when they enlisted Microsoft to help them serve ads to customers in late 2022. But by May 2024, Netflix announced plans to bring the ad-tech in house… and shift away from Microsoft.