HBO Max Sees Huge Subscriber Growth in 2020
by EG
HBO Max invested a lot of money in an attempt to become the place to go to watch both current new-release movies, like Wonder Woman 1984, and popular classic content, like Friends. That strategy seems to be paying off, as the streaming platform saw its subscriber base grow by almost a third in the final months of 2020. It is now undeniably a major player in the battle between platforms. Read on for details.
The final few weeks of 2020 proved invaluable for WarnerMedia's HBO Max. The streaming service, buoyed by an eight-months-in-the-making distribution deal with Roku and the Christmas Day release of Wonder Woman 1984, ended the year with 17.17 million activated users, AT&T disclosed on Wednesday.
HBO Max now reaches 37.665 million total subscribers. That compares with 28.7 million subscribers, including 8.6 million activated users, as of the end of September and 34.6 million as of the end of 2019.
Combined, HBO and HBO Max havd 41.5 million U.S. subscribers as of the end of 2020, compared with 38.0 million as of the end of September.
Launched at the end of May, HBO Max faced a pair of formidable early challenges, overcoming its confusing branding — at the time, WarnerMedia also operated streaming products HBO Now and HBO Go — and its lack of distribution on two major connected TV platforms, Roku and Amazon Fire. Unlike competitor Disney+, which attracted more than 26 million subscribers in its first two months, HBO Max plodded along, adding 4.1 million activated users in its first month.
But interest in the service began to pick up heading in the final few months of 2020 after it struck a distribution deal with Amazon in November and released a content lineup that featured buzzy original series The Flight Attendant and HBO limited series The Undoing.
WarnerMedia signaled the importance of HBO Max to its long-term strategy when it unveiled a hybrid release strategy for Wonder Woman 1984, premiering it in theaters where they were open and on HBO Max in the U.S. on Christmas Day. In a controversial step, the company followed that up with the Dec. 3 announcement that its entire 2021 film slate would follow the same release plan.
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.
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