Max Streaming ‘Enshittifies’ Further, Removes Classic Looney Tunes

Now that subscriber growth has slowed, streaming TV giants have taken the predictable turn of making their services shittier and more expensive to deliver Wall Street (impossibly) unlimited quarterly revenue growth.

That means higher prices, annoying new surcharges, greater restrictions, more layoffs, more cut corners, worse customer service, more limited catalogs, lower quality engagement-bait content, and a lot of pointless mergers designed specifically to goose stock valuations and provide big fat tax breaks.

The king of this enshittification era in streaming has been the AT&T–>Warner Brothers–>Discovery series of mergers, which resulted in no limit of brand degradation, layoffs, and absolute chaos in the empty pursuit of unlimited scale. The dumb merger already killed Mad Magazine, HBO, and countless television shows, driving millions of subscribers to the exits.

And the hits keep on coming. Last week users began grumbling after Max executives decided to delete the entire 1930-1969 run of classic Looney Tunes shorts from the streaming company’s catalog. Because kids’ programming doesn’t sell quite as well as homogenized reality TV dogshit, executives have decided that these old classics are no longer relevant to the public interest.

This is well in line with other similar decisions at other streaming giants, as we saw when Paramount (CBS) recently pulled decades of MTV music journalism, and years of Comedy Central comedy programming, out of circulation. They do this largely because they don’t want to continue paying royalties, and the men in charge have no respect for any sort of collective history. They’re purely extractive animals.

As Jeremy Smith at Slashfilm notes, it is technically an act of cultural vandalism:

“As it currently stands, if you want to watch classic Looney Tunes, your only option is physical media. Warner Bros. Discovery says this is because children’s entertainment doesn’t drive subscriptions (it gave the same excuse for nuking “Sesame Street”), which is obviously a lie given that a good chunk of the new Looney Tunes cartoons, much of which is explicitly aimed at children, is still streaming.”

It’s bad enough that guys like Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslav are fixated on purposeless consolidation, impossible growth, and mindlessly cutting corners. But they’re not particularly competent, either. Their strategies aren’t working in any real sense. They’re not creating quality art, interesting content, longstanding businesses — and their customers are headed for the exists.

Companies like Warner Brothers Discovery have become weird caricatures of sensible business practices. Purely extractive, entirely incoherent, all led by men who aren’t particularly competent. If Zaslav was remotely clever and worth his outsized compensation, the company wouldn’t be desperately waiting to see whether this summer’s Superman retread stands between it and business oblivion.