No matter how much audiences wish they could binge the latest seasons of their favorite Max series all in one go, Content Chief Casey Bloys says that the streamer will continue its commitment to the weekly release strategy.
“It works for us,” he said during a Milken Institute Global Conference panel on the future of the entertainment industry on Wednesday.
Netflix is largely responsibly for popularizing the strategy of dropping all episodes of a new season at once, and many of the major streamers have followed suit, at least for some projects. But, Max remains an outlier. In almost all cases, the streamer releases new episodes weekly — a decision that Bloys says is driven by both financial sensibilities and the desire to lengthen the shelf life of a series.
“Part of the reason we do it is we don’t have the ability to have a new series every week. There’s a difference between dropping a new series every week and a new episode. That is a big financial difference,” he explained.
Bloys pointed to HBO and Max’s proven track record of creating water cooler conversation around appointment television like Succession, Euphoria, Watchmen, Big Little Lies, and The White Lotus.
“Every week we see the audience grow, and there is an entire ecosystem of people who write about, do podcasts about, discuss TV shows. So to not take advantage of that, I think, is crazy. It’s been proven to us so many times over the last 10 years that it works and that creators prefer it that way,” he said. “I always also feel like it’s the best of both worlds, because if you don’t want to watch something week by week at this point now, you can go back and watch all 15 hours of The Pitt.“
In fact, Bloys added, the network has experimented in the past with releasing multiple episodes at a time, but they found that it generally hurt more than it helped, because “it didn’t have time to kind of marinate in culture and have people talk about it.”
This is, of course, not a new strategy for HBO and Max. The company has been reiterating its commitment to the weekly release strategy since the streaming wars began to heat up in 2019. It makes sense given that many of the streamer’s heavy hitters are actually linear series that also air on HBO’s cable channel at the same time they become available on Max.
Netflix, on the other hand, is not beholden to a linear schedule. Other streamers like Paramount+ with Showtime have toyed with the conventional release model as well, often offering episodes a few days earlier on streaming than they air on the linear channel.
But Bloys argues that, at least for Max, the most effective strategy remains the simplest, even for streaming-only series like Hacks and And Just Like That…
“We keep coming back to weekly works,” he said.
