Technology

AT-T and WarnerMedia just announced the pricing of their HBO Max streaming service, along with sharing more details about the timing and content lineup.

The service will cost $14.99 per month — the same price as HBO Now. WarnerMedia also says it will be free for HBO Now subscribers and for viewers who subscribe to HBO via AT-T. And it will launch in May of next year.

The announcement came at an event for investors and media, where HBOCasey Bloys also revealed that the network has greenlit a Game of Thrones spin-off called House of the Dragon, based on George R.R. Martinbook of Westerosi history, Fire and Blood(perhaps explaining whya previously announced spin-off that was recently canceled).

The company also revealed that HBO Max will be the exclusive streaming home of South Park.Plus, Elizabeth Banks, Issa Rae and Mindy Kaling are all developing new shows for the service — andArrow and Riverdale producer Greg Berlanti announced that heworking on the new DC Comics-related titlesGreen Lantern and Strange Adventures.

Todaypresentation for began with lots of commentary about all the corporate synergies between AT-T, WarnerMedia (which AT-Tacquired last year) and the servicenamesake HBO.

WarnerMediaentertainment and direct-to-consumer chairman Bob Greenblatt said HBO Max will have 10,000 hours of content at launch, including the HBO library, films from Warner Bros. and original content &appealing to all the younger demos.&Ten thousand hours sounds like a lot, but Greenblatt acknowledge itless than some competitors (presumably Netflix): &We actually think our value proposition improves when we narrow some of the options.&

HBO Max Chief Content Officer Kevin Reilly made a similar point, noting that on average, half of the usage on subscription streaming services comes from the top 100 titles, so &quality over quantity& is important. To illustrate that quality, he pointed to titles like Sesame Street, as well as the Lord of the Rings movies, The Hobbit movies, The Matrix trilogy and The Conjuring films, plus every Superman and Batman movie from the past 40 years.

&We&re all-in with DC and the associated brand-love that DC generates,& Reilly said.

He also noted the service will stream the 90classic Friends, as well as The Big Bang Theory, for which it reportedlypaid over $1 billion.

As for originals, Reilly said the company plans to launch 31 Max Originals series (combined with HBO series, that makes for 69 original shows on HBO Max in its first year). Half of them, apparently, will be targeted at a young adult audience, with most of the episodes released on a weekly basis — Reilly argued that this allows for more cultural impact, &rather than fading quickly after a binge and burn.&

In terms of the product itself, WarnerMediaExecutive Vice President Andy Forssell argued that &despite a decade of SVOD evolution, itstill too hard to find something to watch,& and said HBO Max will &blend the smart use of data with real human touch, and present them via novel product experiences.&

He then showed off how the service will include curated highlights sections focusing on things like Friends episodes with high-profile guest stars. Forssell acknowledged that this might not seem revolutionary, but he argued that it offers a &significant deviation from how SVOD services have used screen real estate.&

It will also expand HBORecommended by Humans feature, where celebrities and other real people can recommend their favorite movies and TV shows. And there will be kids& profiles and shared profiles — so that the watching you do with others won&t interfere with the progress and recommendations from your own solo viewing.

In July, AT-T first announced its plans for HBO Max, but the details around launch and pricing weren&t yet known. Instead, the attention so far has been on HBO Maxcontent lineup.

The service aims to capitalize on HBOreputation for premium fare to attract consumers — many of whom already pay $15 per month for HBO Now. But it will pad that HBO library with a combination of programming from other WarnerMedia properties like Cinemax, New Line, DC Entertainment, Warner Bros., The CW, CNN, TNT, TBS, TruTV, Turner Classic Movies, Crunchyroll, Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Rooster Teeth, Looney Tunes, and others.

We now know HBO Max will be home to Game of Thrones and its upcoming spin-offs, plus favorite HBO series like The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Deadwood, Westworld,and others.

Italso bringing back Gossip Girl, rebooting Grease, making a Dune TV show, and streaming all 21 Studio Ghibli films.

Other HBO Max shows will include a Riverdale spin-off Katy Keene;Search Party; Batwoman; Adventure Time;Stephen KingThe Outsider;Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams& horror series Lovecraft Country;Joss WhedonThe Nevers; Julian Fellowes& (Downton Abbey) The Gilded Age;David E. KelleyThe Undoing; Rules of Magic, a prequel to Alice HoffmanPractical Magic; The Boondocks; and Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai; plus back catalog content like Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Pretty Little Liars, Doctor Who (2005 and onward), The West Wing, Top Gear, The Office (original version), and others.

Upcoming literary adaptions include Tokyo Vice,The Flight Attendant, Circe,Made for Love,Station Eleven, andAnna K: A Love Story.

More recently, HBO Max has announced a new documentary on Anthony Bourdain, an overall deal with Lisa Ling, a documentary about Amy Schumer, a Melissa McCarthy comedy film, a documentary with Monica Lewinsky, and a new deal with J.J. Abrams& Bad Robot (the deal allows Bad Robot to make TV under the WarnerMedia umbrella and then sell it to other streaming services).

Abrams was part of todayevent. He said ittoo early to announce any specific programming under the new deal — Bad Robot already works with HBO on titles like Westworld, and Abrams has a new show in the works called Demimonde— but he declared, &Thereno company that values storytelling more than WarnerMedia.&

And for classic movie lovers who mourn the loss of FilmStruck, Warner Bros. CEO Ann Sarnoff said the service will offer a rich library of films from the Warner Bros. and MGM catalog, curated titles from Turner Classic Movies, as well as &decades and decades of more great titles from The Criterion Collection.&

AT-T said on Monday it plans to spend about $2 billion on the service over the next two years and aims to sign up some 50 million subscribers by 2025.

The service will arrive at a time when competition in the streaming market is heating up. Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Videosuccesses have paved the way for new entrants like Apple TV+, which launches Friday, and Disney+, which arrives mid-November. NBCU is also joining next year with its streaming service Peacock, which will offer The Office and other classic shows, alongside new originals, like a Battlestar Galactica reboot.

These streamers are gaining at the expense of traditional TV, which has impacted other parts of AT-Tbusiness.

In the third quarter, it lost another 1.2 million satellite and fiber-optic-TV customers as well as 195,000 AT-T TV Now (previously DirecTV Now) subscribers. AT-Tprofit was down 22% year-over-year to $3.7 billion and revenue had fallen 2.5% to $44.6 billion.

Eventually, AT-Tplan is to merge its AT-T TV Now live TV service into HBO Max and add on a discounted ad-supported tier to HBO Max to make it more affordable.

MX Player, a popular video app that offers both local playback and streaming services, said on Wednesday that it has raised $110.8 million in a new financing round led by Chinese internet giant Tencent as the video app looks to expand its business in India and other international markets.

Times Internet, which acquired a majority stake in MX Player in late 2017 for $140 million, also participated in the Series A financing round.The post-money valuation of MX Player was $500 million, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The addition of Tencent — which has invested in a handful of Indian startups including Times Internet-owned Gaana, ride-hailing giant Ola, ed tech startup Byju&s, B2B e-commerce startup Udaan and a bookkeeping service for merchants, Khatabook —&is a great sign of confidence,& said Satyan Gajwani, vice chairman of Times Internet. &Tencent is a leading global force in music and video, and therea lot for us to learn and leverage from their capabilities,& he added.

Karan Bedi, CEO of MX Player, said in an interview that the video app will use the fresh capital to double down on producing original TV shows and broadening its catalog of licensed content. The firm, which has so far added 15 original shows to its platform, has already commissioned production of another 20 by year-end, he said.

The Singapore-headquartered firmpush into original shows and licensed content underscores one of the strangest evolution for a video app. MX Player originated in Korea as an app that could run video files in a wide-range of formats locally stored on a phone.

The app did all of this while consuming little resources, an ability that helped it win tens of millions of users with low-cost Android smartphones in emerging markets such as India. In fact, India is MX Playerlargest market, with 175 million monthly active users, Bedi said. Globally, the app has amassed more than 280 million users.

MX Player is ad-supported and does not charge users any monthly subscription fee. The service, which introduced movies and shows streaming in mid-2018, today also offers access to about 200 TV channels, their current and back catalog of shows, and a music streaming feature through an integration with Gaana.

Bedi said the company has tied up with all-web show producers such as HoiChoi in India and three of the top five TV local cable networks, including Sony and Sun. Missing from the list is Star India, the largest TV network in the country.

Thanks to the acquisition of 21st Century Fox, Disney now owns Star India. Star India has emerged as one of the gems in Disneynew portfolio. The firm, which runs dozens of TV channels in India, operates Hotstar, the market-leading video streaming service.

Hotstar reported 300 million monthly active users and 100 million daily active users during the ICC Cricket World Cup tournament. The service has cashed in on the popularity of cricket to boost its numbers.

Bedi said MX Player is working on building new entertainment experiences, but sports content is not something it is exploring.The reason is simple: Cricket drives most of the sports streaming in India and Star India has secured rights to most of such content. (Facebook recently grabbed a slice of it, too.)

But cricket alone can&t help a streaming service win and sustain customers. Even Hotstarmonthly user base plummets below 60 million in the months following the cricketing season, people familiar with Hotstarinternal figures have told TechCrunch.

Figuring out what exactly resonates with the users in India, the worldsecond largest internet market, is the billion-dollar question. The video streaming market in India is on track to be worth $1.7 billion in the next four years, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Bedi, who spearheaded Eros NowIndia business before joining MX Player, said users are increasingly enjoying the original shows. Most of the shows that MX Player has produced so far, such as &Hey Prabhu,& &Thinkistan& and &Immature,& are largely targeted at college students and those who have just joined the work force. But the company is slowly populating the platform with shows such as &Queen& that appeal &universally,& he said.

MX Player today competes with more than three dozen local and international players, nearly all of which offer their services at dirt-cheap prices in India. Even Netflix, which launched in India with a $8 plan in 2016, this year introduced a $2.8 monthly tier. In recent months, several more firms including e-commerce giant Flipkart and food delivery startup Zomato have launched their video streaming services in the country.

Tencent-rival Alibaba announced earlier this year that it would invest $100 million to expand social video app Vmate in India.

Once cautious about each megabyte they spent consuming internet services, Indians are now spending about 10GB of data on their smartphones each month as data prices crash in the country, according to an Ericsson report. Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani disrupted the local telecom market in 2016 when he launched Reliance Jio. The 4G-only carrier undercut the market by first offering bulk of mobile data at no cost, and then charging very little fee.

&Within a relatively short period of time, MX Player has leveraged its vast user base and rich content library to be one of the leading video-streaming services in India. As the smartphone user base continues to expand in India, we look forward to working with MX Player to further grow its platform by delivering original content and a differentiated user experience,& said Jeffrey Li, Managing Partner at Tencent Investment, in a statement.

An analyst TechCrunch spoke with said itonly a matter of time before Indiavideo market begins to see some consolidation and pull back. &You have to offer something appealing that none of your rivals have,& he said, requesting anonymity as he advises many of these businesses.

For MX Player, its odd evolution story may be its biggest advantage. The applocal video playback feature continues to draw many to it, and keeps the app among the top rated in GooglePlay Store. Bedi said the startup, which today employs about 300 people, maintains a large team that continues to improve the tech stacks to improve video playback support.

Moving forward, MX Player will also look into expanding to some international markets. It recently started beta testing the video streaming service in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Eventually, the startup hopes to make original shows for these markets that are relevant to the local audience there.

MX Player maintains a premium app on Google Play Store that strips ads for $5. But the app continues to mostly rely on revenue it generates from ads. Times InternetGajwani said that at some point in the future, the video service will expand monetization beyond pure advertising. &That said, MX is consumed daily as much as the leading TV channel in India, so theresignificant headroom to capture larger advertising spends as well,& he added.

Paytm, a leading financial services firm in India, was also in talks with MX Player to invest in this financial round. It may invest in the video streaming services app at a later stage, a person familiar with the talks said.

Chan Park feels like &an eternal nomad.& He has since age 12, when he moved from Korea to the U.S., where he attended middle school in Minnesota, followed by high school in New Jersey, followed by college in New Hampshire. Then he really began to bounce around. Park worked as a trader in New York out of college, embraced the ski-bum life in Utah, then headed to Asia for Uber, where he spent six years, running its expansion team, then managing its entire Southeast Asia business out of Singapore.

More specifically, he was responsible for eight countries across the region, and 350 people, which didn&t give him a lot of time to organize his home. But he wasn&t overwhelmed by the chaos. Instead, he says that in Singapore, something unusual happened. &Therethis huge culture of landlords furnishing space to attract expats,& explains Park. &The furnishings aren&t super high-end, but they&re well-designed and well put together, and it enabled me to be basically moved in as soon as I put my clothes in the closet.& Suddenly, coming home was a treat — a new sensation for him. &For the first time, I was proud to host friends for dinners and barbecues and to just open the door and relax.&

Park knew his U.S. friends could benefit from the same experience, and before long, he was talking with his Dartmouth classmate turned product and industrial designer Christian Talmage about forming their own company. Enter Oliver Space, which provides a lot of what that Singaporean landlord delivered to Park. It furnishes places for busy professionals, making moving into a new home as easy as hanging up their clothes.

The now year-old service is available in the Bay Area only. And Oliver Space employs just a dozen people so far. But the company has already gained enough traction to attract $6.8 million in seed funding from an interesting array of investors, including Mayfield, Abstract Ventures, investors Jana Messerschmidt and April Underwood, Opendoor founder Eric Wu, and Kevin and Julia Hartz of Eventbrite, among others.

Now, Oliver Space just has to grow as quickly, or more so, than other furniture-as-service startups to recently attract funding. Among these is Fernish, a two-year-old, LA-based startup that helps people rent from brands like Crate - Barrel, Floyd and Campaign. It attracted $30 million in funding earlier this year led by Real Estate Technology Ventures, with participation from Intuitfounder Scott Cook and Amazonhead of global consumer, Jeff Wilke. Another rival is Feather, a two-year-old, New York-based furniture rental startup that similarly works with known brands like West Elm and Pottery Barn and meanwhile closed a $12 million round a few months ago led by Spark Capital. (It has raised $16 million altogether.)

Park, who as an Uber alum is very attuned to the competition, knows his own startup isn&t the first out of the gate. He thinks it can win on a few fronts, however.

For one thing, while Oliver Space uses traditional retailers for some of the items itrenting, it is also making Oliver Space-branded furnishings — from sectionals to dining tables to beds — with the help of &dozens& of manufacturers in China and elsewhere, says Park. Part of its focus is on being able to assemble, and later disassemble, its furnishings fast, so that when a customer walks into his or her home, everything is picture perfect.

Park also stresses design, saying that Oliver Space wants to replace that friend with great taste to whom a college graduate or busy young professional would otherwise turn for help. Indeed, the company puts together &mood boards& for customers, featuring everything from loveseats to plants to pillows to candles, all of which it will happily rent to its customers on a monthly or even yearly basis. In fact, the longer a customer commits to rent items, the less they pay. If they decide eventually to buy the items, Oliver Space will sell them at their retail price, deducting all of their previous rental payments and considering them instead down payments on the furnishings.

As for what happens when that furniture isn&t brand-new, Park says Oliver Space has plans to inspect, clean and repair pieces as needed. He likens the opportunity to that of the car market, where pre-owned, certified cars are another source of revenue.

&In furniture, used means Craigslist, and you have no idea where a sofa or a rug has been,& says Park. &As our business grows, we&ll be creating that pre-owned concept with our brandstamp of approval.&

Maybe so. Itearly to know if these differentiators are enough to make the company stand out. A lot depends on execution as Oliver Space grows out of the Bay Area and into other markets. (Park won&t yet say where these will be.)

In the meantime, iteasy to understand the appeal of the company and its rivals. Beyond making consumers& lives easier in numerous ways and more stylish, Oliver Space and its peers may prove better for the environment. At least, with a reported 9.8 million tons of furniture that is thrown into a landfill every year in the U.S. alone, more eco-conscious shoppers may well decide they&re at least worth trying out.