HBO Max has no problems with password sharing, left AT&T with a subscriber record
In the same quarter that Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers (well, when counting those in Russia to no fault of their own), forcing its stock price down 35%, HBO Max gained 3 million new customers.
This comes just as AT&T spun off HBO Max as part of a new venture called Warner Bros. Discovery that combined content from HBO, Warner, DC, and the Discovery network. Too bad, but the subscriber growth may have something to do with the HBO Max expansion last quarter that saw it appearing in many new global markets, especially in Europe where its movies and TV series are extremely popular.
The current HBO Max subscribers are 123.4 million, of which 48.6 million subscribers in the US, and 76.8 million worldwide, representing a solid 12.8 million subs growth in the span of just a year.
Granted, the prices that some of those overseas HBO Max subscribers pay are much lower than in the US, but then again they would have been lost to pirating content or not shelling out for the service altogether.
On the other hand, HBO Max is not as worried about password sharing of its accounts as Netflix started to be after the subscriber count meltdown. According to AT&T's CEO John Stankey during the earnings call for the last quarter when HBO Max was part of the carrier's portfolio, the service has instituted measures against rampant password sharing that have proven to work very well.
"In any given month we’ve actively looked into how particular users are using the product, and we have technical features and capabilities to limit what I would call rampant abuse," said John Stankey, and added that those HBO Max terms and conditions against password sharing are "customer-sensitive", so they didn't "see anybody complaining massively about it," and the rising HBO Max subscriber count only comes to prove their point.
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