Discovery+ Isn’t Waiting Quietly for the WarnerMedia Merger

The announced merger between Discovery and AT&T’s WarnerMedia would bring together big media brands — Warner Bros. and Property Brothers, Deadwood and Deadliest Catch, Sesame Street and Sister Wives — with HBO Max and Discovery+ likely combining into a single streamer to compete globally with Netflix, Disney and Amazon.

No time soon, though. The combined company, which execs are calling Warner Bros. Discovery, would be the third-largest global media company behind Disney and Netflix, but AT&T and Discovery execs don’t expect regulators to approve the deal until mid-2022.

Discovery will have its hands full in the meantime:

• Magnolia Network, a joint venture with Fixer Upper hosts Chip and Joanna Gaines, launches on Discovery+ and a new app on July 15 and on cable in January 2022.
• Eurosport, Discovery’s European sports network, will broadcast the Tokyo Olympics live across most of Europe in July and August.
• Discovery’s cable networks and Discovery+ will premiere a gigantic slate of new and returning originals this year, including 60-plus new titles announced at its upfront presentation.
• Discovery looks to grow its 15 million (mostly Discovery+) streaming subscribers to 34 million subscribers by the end of 2022, according to RBC Capital Markets analyst Kutgun Maral.

“I’m extraordinarily optimistic,” Discovery CEO David Zaslav said during Discovery’s recent quarterly earnings call. “We’ve gotten off to a great start with Discovery+, exceeding our expectations, and are effectively managing through a dynamic, fluid and exciting a time as I have ever seen in my many years in the media business.”

Zaslav will run the combined company if the deal is approved by regulators. For now, three of the big focuses for Discovery+ are Magnolia Network, customization, and live channels. Here’s a closer look at how those three areas will evolve over the next year.

Magnolia Network Has Breakout Potential

New cable networks are out of fashion in the streaming era, but Magnolia Network is launching with both cable and streaming households in mind. The lifestyle network will launch as a dedicated tab on Discovery+ and as freestanding Magnolia app on July 15 and then as a cable rebrand of DIY in January 2022.

Magnolia Network is building shows around a core group of designers, chefs, gardeners, artists, etc., with a big emphasis on story and a documentary look and feel. From watching the two Magnolia Network: A Look Ahead preview specials and the first episodes of many upcoming shows, my expectations are extremely high.

Together in Fixer Upper: Welcome Home, Chip and Joanna Gaines are leads in a screwball comedy. (He’s a goofy extrovert; she’s a wry taskmaster.) Separately — Chip training for a marathon in The Courage to Run, Joanna cooking her family history in Magnolia Table — they eschew the performative pluck of most HGTV and Food Network hosts for empathetic, stripped-down storytelling.

Magnolia Network will have the usual lifestyle formats — cooking (Ranch to Table, Zoë Bakes), home renovation (Mind for Design, First Time Fixer), uplifting docuseries (The Lost Kitchen, The Courage to Run) — but the network’s development team has focused on relatability, aspiration, and narrative-building over theme songs and stagey presentation.

A good example of that keep-it-real approach is Ranch to Table, where Elizabeth Poett doesn’t so much host as do with a camera crew in tow. She cooks and narrates with the easy elegance of a Kenyon College grad who worked in MTV’s documentary unit, but she’s perfectly comfortable loading hay bails into a pickup truck on the family cattle ranch where she grew up.

Decider’s Meghan O’Keefe has been profiling upcoming Magnolia shows, including Home Work (family renovates an old school building into a family home) and Van Go (kooky guy turns vans into mobile homes). The network’s programming lineup is deep with 20 or so shows premiering around launch and more coming over the rest of 2021 and into the cable launch in January 2022.

How Do You Sort Through 55,000 TV Episodes?

Half of U.S. households subscribe to four or more streamers, according to a December survey by J.D. Power, and you can cancel one at any time with a few clicks. That gives a a big advantage to streamers with deep catalogs, a steady supply of new titles, an easy user experience, and a reliable recommendations engine.

Discovery+ launched in January with 55,000 episodes from Food Network, HGTV, TLC, Investigation Discovery, OWN, Travel Channel, etc., plus more that 50 new, exclusive titles. Discovery+ segments that enormous library into interest areas that you can navigate by genre, cable network, editorial recommendations, and algorithmic recommendations.

From launch until now, the recommendations on Discovery+ have been more editorial-driven than algorithmic-driven, says Michael Bishara, the streamer’s lead U.S. exec. This summer, the streamer will start shifting toward more algorithmic-driven personalization that gets better the more you watch.

“The network hubs, the ordering of the genres, and the rows below that will become customized,” Bishara said in an interview with Decider. “That will also begin to vary more depending on day part and device. Those things will all be very data-driven.”

Discovery+ subscribers have already watched more than 93% of the 55,000-episode catalog, Bishara said. Users are finding hidden gems and deep-catalog shows like Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives (39 seasons) and Ghost Adventures (23 seasons). My wife and I are 100-plus episodes into TLC’s 90 Day Fiancé franchise, and we’ve still got a long way to go.

“In the second half of the year,” Bishara said, “we’re looking to add parental controls, we’re looking to enable downloads, we’ll expand to some additional devices, and we’ll continue expanding the use of personalization and recommendation capabilities.”

Sometimes You Just Want to Watch ‘House Hunters’

Discovery+ launched without full seasons of Food Network’s Chopped, HGTV’s House Hunters, and other titles that Discovery had previously licensed exclusively to Hulu. As a workaround, Discovery+ began streaming those shows on 11 “live” channels of 24/7 content that are available from a row in the streamer’s interface.

Those channels don’t make much sense for serialized titles like 90 Day Fiancé, but they’re great for episodic shows like Chopped and House Hunters. (90 Day Fiancé moved exclusively to Discovery+ in early May, and the other shows will likely follow over time.)

I don’t get the allure of 24/7 channels for catalog shows — who wants to start at the 14th minute of a random episode of Property Brothers? — but they’re popular with consumers who want to click through a channel grid and quickly find something to watch. IMDb TV, Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus, Peacock, and Pluto TV all heavily emphasize 24/7 channels in their user experiences, and Pluto TV has grown from 20 million to 50 million monthly active users in just the last 18 months.

Discovery+ sees value in its 24/7 channels beyond a licensing workaround. Amazon’s Fire TV platform has a dedicated Live tab that integrates paid streamers, free streamers, and broadcast channels. If you have a Fire TV device and subscribe to Discovery+ through Amazon’s Prime Video Channels, the 11 Discovery+ channels will be available to stream in your Live tab.

Scott Porch writes about the TV business for Decider. He is a contributing writer for The Daily Beast and produces the Must Watch streaming podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.