Following earlier indications by company management of a consolidation of its two major streaming services, Warner Bros. Discovery announces it will combine HBO Max and Discovery+ into a single, yet-to-be-named service in mid-2023. Citing HBO Max's technical issues since its May 2020 rollout (as it runs on the infrastructure originally used for predecessor services HBO Go and HBO Now, which was designed to support the even smaller content selection and technical demands of HBO Max), the combined offering will run on Discovery+'s existing app infrastructure and utilize that service's technical operations. The planned merger later results in the removal of 36 titles from HBO Max plus all films in the Harry Potter film series and nearly 200 episodes of children's series Sesame Street. The plans to fully merge the services is abandoned in February 2023, leaving Discovery+ alone as a standalone service. However, the programming changes will not be undone as a direct result, and rebranding HBO Max is still planned. See more