David Zaslav Is Zaslav'ing Again

That Max app — which is now once again the HBO Max app (formerly HBO GO, HBO Now, then HBO Max, before briefly becoming just Max) — will soon be far less cluttered with all the content no one asked for when they originally signed up to watch Silicon Valley back in 2014.

After David Zaslav moved from Discovery to Warner Bros. and merged the two companies under one bloated app to compete with Netflix, he’s finally realized what everyone else knew from the jump: subscribers didn’t want another Netflix. We already have Netflix. We subscribe to HBO because we want HBO content. And now, that’s exactly what we’re going to get.

Zaslav is splitting the company into two. On the streaming side, Warner Bros. Television, Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, DC Studios, HBO, HBO Max, and their combined movie and television libraries will form one company. The other, still unnamed, will house Discovery+ content, CNN, TBS, TNT, and all those cable channels no one watches anymore. It’ll be the home for sports, news, and house-flipping shows. Bleacher Report is also tagging along with the spin-off.

It’s a move not unlike Comcast’s recent decision to offload USA Network, MSNBC, CNBC, E!, Oxygen, Syfy, and Golf Channel into its own side hustle, Versity. Think of it as amputating a necrotic limb so the rest of the body can survive while the limb rots in peace. Sure, for now, there’s still plenty of cash in those cable networks, since cable subscribers continue to shell out $80 a month to subsidize 75 channels they never watch just to get Fox News and ESPN. But as Fox News and ESPN spin off into their own streaming platforms, those lucrative carriage fees will dry up, and that dying limb will need new blood to keep twitching. Eventually, it might make sense for Versity and this new spin-off company to merge into one giant, useless blob of cable television detritus and rebrand as a FAST network, like Tubi, because that’s the only way it sustains itself.

The split is expected to happen around mid-2026, so for the next year or so, the HBO Max app will presumably continue to carry CNN Max and episodes of Polyfamily, though if you’ve opened the app lately, you’ll notice most of the Discovery content has already been buried.

Zaslav will oversee the HBO side of the business, while WBD CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels gets stuck with the less glamorous gig as President and CEO of the Global Networks company. Which honestly seems backwards. Zaslav came from Discovery, he masterminded this whole ill-conceived merger, and if there’s any justice, he should be the one stuck babysitting the dying half of the company he created.