What can we expect from HBO Max – the UK’s newest streaming service?

If there’s one thing we’re not short of in this country, it’s streaming video services.

We recently reported how the proliferation of streaming platforms means it’s now possible to spend £400 a month on these services.

Yet despite rapidly darkening economic conditions, HBO Max are about to roll out their own streaming video on demand platform internationally.

Having recently launched in Germany and Italy, the 26th of March will see the service debut in a variety of Asia-Pacific markets, as well as the UK and Ireland.

The new service offers a wealth of archived content including the combined future output of parent companies Warner Bros and Discovery.

But what will this mean in practice?

A world of Discovery

To establish whether HBO Max is worth the money, it’s important to consider how this Frankenstein’s monster came to exist.

It began with Warner Bros, one of Hollywood’s Big Five studios, which became Time Warner in 1990 after a merger between Warner Bros and Time Inc.

In the febrile dotcom boom, Time Warner and AOL engaged in a disastrous amalgamation, before American telecommunications giant AT&T acquired AOL Time Warner in 2018.

In 2021, Discovery and AT&T announced a merger of their own, with the combined company to be known as Warner Bros Discovery.

This was also fairly disastrous, and after a year of legal wrangling, AT&T announced WarnerMedia would be spun off and merged with Discovery to create WBD.

WBD brought a number of brands under one banner – HBO, DC Entertainment, the Warner Bros studios and Discovery content – as well as channels like CNN, TNT and Cartoon Network.

This coagulation of unconnected brands has been thrashing around in search of an identity ever since, losing hundreds of millions of dollars in the last financial quarter alone.

The solution was to roll everything into one subscription service, though the recent highly public bidding war between Netflix and Paramount for WBD ownership has further muddied the waters.

At the time of writing, Paramount Skydance appears to have won, thanks to an exceptionally generous $110 billion bid.

For now, HBO Max is launching under its existing ownership next week. But what will it consist of?

You pays your money…

For the reasons outlined above, HBO Max will host a far more jumbled assortment of content than rivals like Disney+, which is itself an amalgam of Star, Marvel, Disney and Pixar material.

It will finally bring all HBO content (including House of the Dragon and The Last of Us) into one place, albeit at the expense of NOW TV subscribers.

These flagship series will be available alongside Warner Bros movies, DC Studios output and TNT Sports coverage.

The latter encompasses Champions League and FA Cup football, snooker, tennis, cycling, golf, MotoGP and cricket.

Archive content ranges from Harry Potter and Game of Thrones to Friends and The Sopranos, while new material includes One Battle After Another and The Pitt.

UK subscribers will be offered five different plans, though Sky customers will receive HBO Max by default in future subscriptions, alongside Disney+.

A Basic subscription has been priced at £4.99 a month, enabling simultaneous streaming on two devices in full HD.

An extra pound a month unlocks a greater film archive, but both packages have adverts.

Banishing ads costs £9.99 a month for the Standard package, while £14.99 unlocks Premium’s 4K UHD content, four-device streaming and further content.

You can also pay an additional £16 per month to access TNT Sports, with 4K streaming across two devices.

The platform will support five user profiles per account, the obligatory curated recommendations and parental controls, plus the option to download content.

Ultimately, there’s nothing innovative here, like themed streaming service venues or user-generated content.

Determining whether HBO Max is worth subscribing to will depend on how appealing its content roster is to individuals.

Choice is always welcome in competitive industries, but in the current economic maelstrom, it’s questionable how many households will add HBO Max to their monthly outgoings.