HBO Adds 1.7 Million Subscribers to Reach 38 Million, Including 8.6 Million on HBO Max

HBO and HBO Max now have 38 million subscribers as of Q3 2020, up 1.7 million from last quarter. In Q2, the company revealed that 4.1 million had activated their HBO Max account, but now 8.6 million have activated the service.

In comparison, Disney+ added nearly 26.5 million subscribers over their first 1.5 month period. Netflix announced they added 2.5 million subscribers in U.S. and Canada in their second quarter.

The company however is still without distribution deals on Roku and Amazon Fire TV, leaving almost 80 million active devices without access to HBO Max. Subscribers, can access HBO on those devices through the HBO App.

Much of the company’s focus in primarily on HBO Max, as they are relying on the service to not only bring faith back into the HBO brand, but also widen the demographic.

“HBO has a distinct character brand and demo, associated with it. And it will maintain that. Unfortunately, that character and brand isn’t quite as broad. It’s by design looked at for a specific age profile and a specific taste,” Stankey said during the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live event yesterday. “Max is designed to broaden things a little bit, and still put very high quality content out there, may be with a slightly different approach to it than what you might see for a traditional HBO show. It broadens the capabilities of HBO Max to be used within an entire family set.”

For the company, the strategy to diversify the content offered on HBO Max has proven to be effective, as Stankey revealed they are now “growing subscribers again, where HBO had largely plateaued for five years.”