HBO Max No Longer Available through Amazon Prime Video Channels
HBO Max continues to assert its independence from its old streaming partners. If you look for the service on Amazon Prime Video, you won’t find it anymore.
We knew this was coming. The departure was announced in November 2020, but we didn’t know the exact timing. This also isn’t a death blow for existing subscribers.
If you had HBO through Prime Video, you can still access your content on HBO Max by signing in with your Prime Video credentials. You also can still use HBO Max on Amazon Fire TV devices by signing up for the service directly, which became available in November. Last year, Amazon said more than 5 million HBO subscribers received the service through Prime Video Channels.
This news comes just a few days after HBO vanished from Apple TV Channels offerings.
This is how to sign up for HBO Max if your Prime Video subscription is being canceled.
Why didn’t WarnerMedia break free from Amazon entirely when they launched HBO Max? You may remember that when HBO Max debuted, it wasn’t available on Amazon’s Fire TV devices. After a six-month stalemate, WarnerMedia extended their Amazon Web Services (AWS) contract in order to get HBO Max on Fire TV. As part of all these negotiations, HBO kept its legacy content available as a Prime Video channel, although you needed to log into HBO Max to see any of those service’s exclusives.
After the stalemate ended, the HBO app on Fire TV and Fire tablets automatically became the HBO Max app.
This process of HBO Max emancipation has taken longer than you might expect. As recently as 2020, Prime Video subscribers had free access to older HBO shows. That meant that even if you didn’t subscribe to HBO, you could watch episodes of “The Sopranos,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Veep,” “Sex and the City,” and “The Wire.” In May of that year, those episodes disappeared.
Amazon Prime Video also provided a brief loophole, since you could use it to get a free trial of HBO Max, even after HBO Max killed off that offer for new subscribers directly through their platform in December.
Prime Video Channels is a huge driver of subscribers for streaming services, but it comes at a cost. It has been reported that Amazon keeps 30% of subscription revenue every month, which makes it an expensive channel of distribution. In 2018, TDG estimated that nearly 53% of HBO’s direct-to-consumer subscribers came from Amazon Channels.
Max
Max is a subscription video streaming service that gives access to the full HBO library, along with exclusive Max Originals. There are hubs for content from TLC, HGTV, Food Network, Discovery, TCM, Cartoon Network, Travel Channel, ID, and more. Watch hit series like “The Last of Us,” “House of the Dragon,” “Succession,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and more. Thanks to the B/R Sports add-on, users can watch NBA, MLB, NHL, March Madness, and NASCAR events.