AT&T TV Now's numbers may be falling off a cliff, but AT&T is still pretty bullish on its HBO Max service, which launched in May 2020.
AT&T CEO John Stankey gave an update on the first months of HBO Max during the company's Q2 2020 earnings call and said that more than 4 million accounts had been activated since the service launched.
The numbers get a little fuzzy given the myriad ways one can acquire an HBO Max account — it's essentially free if you already had access to HBO Now, or if you're using a number of other AT&T products like its unlimited wireless service or its fiber broadband service. But the total numbers are there.
"One month after launch," Stankey said on the call, "HBO Max had about 3 million retail subscribers, and 4.1 million subscribers had activated their Max account. Of those, more than 1 million were wholesale subscribers through AT&T."
So there's that.
But there's still the matter of HBO Max not being available on Amazon Fire TV devices, and Stankey called them out by name on that while, interestingly, not mentioning Roku, which is the leading streaming platform in the United States.
"We've worked hard to make HBO Max available to consumers through nearly every content distributor in the United States," Stankey said. "We tried repeatedly to make HBO Max available to all customers using Amazon Fire devices, including those customers who have purchased HBO via Amazon. Unfortunately Amazon has taken an approach of treating HBO Max and its customers differently from how they've chose to treat other services, and their customers."
It's hard to know what to make out of the fact that Stankey didn't put Roku on blast. That could mean that those negotiations are going better, or nearing their completion. Or it could just mean that they're not as acrimonious.
But it doesn't change the fact that you still can't get HBO Max on Amazon Fire TV or Roku.
