After teasing the plan last week, HBO Max is moving ahead with its plan to offer a lower subscription price through an ad-supported plan that will launch in June.
The new plan, with a price point currently under wraps, will be presented to investors as part of the burgeoning streaming service’s aggressive push to bring in more new subscribers after the May 2020 launch.
The service picked up steam in December when the simultaneous theatrical and streaming release of Wonder Woman 1984 nearly doubled its subscribers. That hybrid release strategy, which has stirred up considerable controversy amongst filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve, put HBO Max so ahead of schedule that it’s now raising its subscriber target for 2025 to 120 to 150 million. Via Deadline, which reports word from AT&T:
The new subscriber target is a significant bump from the range of 75 million to 90 million initially put forward by the company in October 2019. As of the end of 2020, it was at 41.5 million when combined with traditional HBO. The number of subscribers to HBO who had activated their HBO Max subscriptions stood at 17.2 million.
Clearly, HBO Max is liking the number it’s seeing thanks to Warner Bros. releasing its entire 2021 film slate on the streaming service, and the new lower price plan is sure to attract more users. “If we can wake up and use price and be able to kind of invent and do things elegantly through advertising to reduce the price of the service, I think that’s a fantastic thing for fans,” WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar told investors last week.
