In recent weeks, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has felt like a proper villain, focused only on the bottom line.

Films have been abruptly canceled, TV shows have been pulled from HBO Max with no explanation, executives have been let go, exacerbating the company's already significant diversity issue, and its market cap has been reduced by $20 billion — all in an effort to save $3 billion and, ideally, right a ship Zaslav happens to think is wayward.

Zaslav's strategy is to make as much money as possible as inexpensively as possible. When he first joined Discovery in 2006, it was a modest network of educational cable channels.

Zaslav transformed it into the reality television monstrosity we know today. He's made his money by appealing to audiences that don't pay for streaming but instead turn on the TV and go to the movies when they can't find anything to watch.

HBO is off the pedestal

HBO has been synonymous with excellence and craftsmanship for ages: a venue where creatives could take significant risks even if they weren't immediately successful.

While Zaslav often uses the word "prestige", his recent decisions reflect a different strategy than his HBO forebears. Zaslav has been entrusted with reducing billions of dollars of debt and stated in April that every decision would be made through the prism of examining asset value.

In July, HBO opted not to proceed with J.J. Abrams' sci-fi series Demimonde, which had a projected budget of more than $200 million. This reflects the cost-conscious outlook that the new management has taken.

HBO Max also revealed that it would soon begin streaming various series from Chip and Joanna Gaines' (Fixer Upper) TV empire, which may lack critical acclaim but makes up for it in mass appeal and popularity.

Zaslav said that the two would not be the only Discovery+ natives joining the HBO Max family: all of the platform's programming - including Dr. Pimple Popper: This Is Zit and Toddlers and Tiaras: Where Are They Now? - will be consolidated into a single, unnamed streaming service.

Entertainment is all about streaming

In today's society, live streaming has become an essential aspect of life for the entertainment sector. Platforms can host the same number of people as in-person events, if not more.

Online casinos use it to live stream casino games, gamers get on servers together and play with opponents from the other side of the world, TV shows are now available on demand, and as the pandemic showed, when you are home, remote access to everything is essential.

To corner this market, many media companies (sometimes identified as tech companies) are producing more content than ever or merging to form bigger libraries. David Zaslav is taking the merger approach, but when it comes to content, he has controversial ideas, to say the least.

Warner Bros. animation and Cartoon Network

The removal of animated content from HBO Max has been framed as a method to "save money," which is odd given that the founder of Cartoon Network demonstrated that there was a lot of money to be made in animation as long as you value the form and its creators.

HBO Max has become the same problem that Cartoon Network was designed to alleviate, and it's the consequence of someone who doesn't comprehend the importance of animation and dismisses it as 'for children'. 

Even worse, Warner Bros. Discovery didn't only delete a slew of shows off their streaming service; Cartoon Network has removed all mention of some of their content from their sites (Note: Cartoon Network and HBO Max share the same corporate parent in Warner Bros. Discovery.).

This is a blatant attempt to avoid paying any residuals to those who worked on these episodes, since what's destroying the livelihoods and labor of a handful or 40 shows' worth of people if it means a business can end the year in the black?

Trying to grasp precisely how gloomy this decision is for everyone involved is an impossible task, but it's crucial to realize that this move isn't just a deletion of so many people's labor; it's also an erasure of the network that delivered the programs in the first place.

This new monstrosity in the streaming giants' pantheon does not care about kids or adults who enjoy animated shows.

Where are the streaming giants headed?

We've seen a TV revival in recent years. So much television has been produced in such a short period and for such a high price that there is now a scarcity of skilled showrunners. Since every firm is scrambling to stock its new streaming services with content to watch, a wide range of people who have seldom — if ever — had the chance to see their lives portrayed on TV have had that chance.

That is about to change for reasons that have everything to do with money and nothing to do with art. It will probably be great for the shareholders, but not so much for everyone else.

The merger of HBO Max and Discovery+, two specialty scarcity platforms, suggests that the one-lane strategy is no longer feasible for large organizations.

Despite a recent survey indicating that HBO Max had the highest level of customer satisfaction, WBD determined that they could earn more money by combining it with the drastically different shows on Discovery.

With each earnings call, the likelihood of returning to a cable-style subscription world grows.