Netflix chief Ted Sarandos says ‘Max’ should have just been called ‘HBO’

• Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, said “Max” should have been called “HBO.”
• In an interview with Variety, he said the brand asked consumers to focus on the wrong thing.
• He added that he doesn’t see Amazon Prime as competition, and he doesn’t “understand” Apple TV.

Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, once saw HBO as the “gold standard of original programming” — but he thinks parent company Warner Bros. Discovery made a mistake when renaming its streaming service.

“It was a surprise! We would always watch what HBO was doing, and at one point, they had HBO, HBO Go, HBO Now, and HBO Max,” Sarandos said in an interview with Variety. “And I said, ‘When they’re serious, all those names will go away, and it’ll just be HBO.'”

“HBO Max” became just “Max” after the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery in 2021.

“This new brand signals an important change from two narrower products, HBO Max and Discovery+, to our broader content offering and consumer proposition,” JB Perrette, CEO of Global Streaming & Games for Warner Bros. Discovery, said in a 2023 press release.

“While each product offered something for some people, Max will have a broad array of quality choices for everybody,” he added.

In the process, according to Sarandos, the streaming service drew consumer focus to the wrong aspect of the brand.

“I would have never guessed HBO would have gone away,” he said. “They put all that effort into one thing that they can tell the consumer — it should be HBO.”

The proliferation of individual streaming services has ramped up heavily in recent years, including Amazon Prime, Max, and Apple TV. Regardless, Sarandos doesn’t feel threatened.

“I felt a lot more comfortable that we would do better at this than they would,” Sarandos said when asked whether he was worried when some of Netflix’s suppliers, like Disney, suddenly became rivals.

In a letter to shareholders in January 2025, the company reported surpassing 300 million subscribers.

“Our advantage is the investment we’ve made in personalization,” he added. “We are not a one-genre label.”

Sarandos also doesn’t see Amazon Prime as capable of competing with Netflix in terms of movie and TV production, but he qualified that it is difficult for him to predict whether the company could pose a threat in the future without an awareness of their “long-term plans.”

As for Apple, which has recently seen increased viewership of Apple TV+ thanks to marquee original programming like “Severance,” Sarandos doesn’t understand why the company invested in a streaming arm at all.

“I don’t understand it beyond a marketing play, but they’re really smart people,” he said. “Maybe they see something we don’t.”

Above all else, Sarandos believes that Netflix’s massive content library will continue to distinguish them from other players in the game.

“If you love documentary, Netflix is the doc house,” he said. “If you love drama, it’s the drama house. As long as we have the ability to do that, we’re going to be fine.”

Amazon, Warner Brothers Discovery, Netflix, and Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Business Insider prior to publication.