Looking Into HBO Max's Q3 Subscriber Numbers

There seems to be a bit of confusion in the media around the reported numbers this morning for #HBOMax. I've included two charts below that I put together for Variety Intelligence Platform's analysis which should make it clearer.

First, to the best of my knowledge, no-one should be adding together the activation totals for Q2 and Q3, as it doesn't appear that these are quarterly totals, but overall totals (much as the other subscriber totals in the release). What this masks is impressive growth for HBO TV subs who've activated their Max accounts, from 1.1 million in Q2 to 5 million in Q3. This still has a long way to go, but I think it's a little nuts to assume that there will ever be 100% conversion. HBO's TV subscribers will include older consumers who don't stream and don't ever intend to stream; sometimes it seems that this fact is all but forgotten.

I also updated the article I wrote last quarter that attempted to make sense of the labelling AT&T gives the different HBO subscriber types. This throws up some interesting findings, beginning with the impact that HBO Max's promotional pricing in September ($12 a month for the first 12 months) had on independent subscriptions (i.e. signing up directly or via a platform). These increased by 600k across the Q3 period.

What increased by a greater degree were HBO subscriptions via a pay-tv services who have signed agreements to AT&T to allow access to HBO Max. These increased by 1.5 million (2.5x the number who signed up for Max directly), suggesting that many prefer to still access the linear channels in addition to Max, rather than only having access to the streaming service. If this hunch is accurate, that there's a greater value perception in linear networks + streaming access than just streaming, unless Max ultimately integrates linear feeds, it appears that the long-term trend for subscriptions will be via MVPD and VMVPD providers.