Following the trend of its other partners, HBO's parent company, WarnerMedia, today announced that current subscribers of HBO on Hulu will receive HBO Max for free when it launches on May 27.
That's in line with Apple . And Google . And current HBO Now subscribers. And a lot of folks who already give AT&T money . (AT&T owns WarnerMedia.)
Here's the statement:
WarnerMedia and Hulu have reached a distribution agreement that will make HBO Max, WarnerMedia's best-in-class streaming offering, available to Hulu subscribers when it launches on May 27, 2020. A valued distributor of our networks for a number of years, Hulu joins our growing roster of distribution partners that will offer HBO Max on day one, giving customers choice in where and how they access the offering's 10,000 hours of curated content.
And that's that. Suffice to say at this point that if you're paying for HBO in some capacity, you'll have access to HBO Max when it launches in three weeks.
So why all the hubbub? Headlines, for one. But the move also will nicely inflate HBO Max's numbers. It's a little more complicated than just saying "HBO is now HBO Max" and simply adding all the other WarnerMedia content to the HBO you already know and love — and chances are there are some legal reasons why that isn't going to happen.
But the end result for those of us on the other side of the TV is the same. We get more content, for the same price we were paying already.
To the Max
It's not just HBO — it's HBO Max
Think of HBO Max this way: It's the best of HBO (as in all of it), plus more from the greater WarnerMedia empire, with content from TNT, TBS, Cartoon Network, TCM and more!
