re: Why did they remove “HBO” from Max?

Branding is complicated, especially when you have a square peg / round hole situation like Discovery & Warner.

Originally we had HBO Go. Then Warner (AT&T?) decided they wanted to create a one-stop streaming platform to house all of their content. Putting Cartoon Network content inside the HBO Go app obviously would have been a little weird. So they rebranded to HBO Max - which works because it implies both “HBO + Cinemax” as well as “HBO + more.”

Now you have Discovery buying WarnerMedia and the Discovery execs feel like their Discovery+ streaming service is also successful. I don’t know how true that is but you can bet thats how they see it.

IMO it would make perfect sense to just roll Discovery+ into HBO Max because it still fits that “HBO and more” mold. But that would require the Discovery branding/marketing people to acknowledge that their brand is straight up inferior to HBO Max. So they change it to make it “their” branding idea instead.

This shite happens all the time with M&A among big conglomerates.