HBO Max All Go for Mid-Year

HBO Max will launch as planned mid-year in NZ, despite Warner Bros. Discovery’s sale to Paramount Skydance.

The acquisition raised questions about whether HBO Max’s future here was assured after Paramount Skydance announced it would be merging HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single streaming platform.

But that deal will not stop HBO Max splitting from Sky and setting up its own direct-to-consumer platform as part of a wider global roll-out.

The confirmation is good news and bad for fans of HBO dramas, the best of which surpass what Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ churn out.

Their availability as a value-added incentive to switch to Sky’s White Box was remarkable. Unlike when Sky launched its HBO-driven SoHo channel behind a paywall, it didn’t cost subscribers extra to stream HBO Max while Neon’s library mushroomed with new shows and movies.

Sky has extended its deals with Paramount and Sony Pictures Television to mitigate the impact of losing HBO Max. And while Yellowstone and Outlander spin-offs will be top drawcards, they’ll struggle to rival the prestige or buzz of an HBO Max trophy drama like The Pitt, The Last of Us or The White Lotus.

Even in the last couple of years, when HBO Max has lost some of its mojo, its slate still stands out from the competition.

Putting aside self-interest, Paramount Skydance boss David Ellison isn’t exaggerating when he calls HBO the “gold standard” in TV.

However, at the same time both Sky and WBD undermined HBO Max’s appeal here. WBD compromised the iconic brand by briefly dropping ‘HBO’ from the moniker and muddling its marque by bundling so many reality-driven Discovery shows into the mix.

Sky, meanwhile, never offered the service in 4K-UHD and Dolby Atmos, even though the White Box has this streaming capability.

Presumably, it was to keep the service simple as a ‘free’ addition to White Box subscribers rather than introduce plans that included 4K-UHD as a premium tier.

You can expect a 4K-UHD plan when HBO Max does go live here.

What else is likely? Hopefully a deeper movie library that ranges from more WB classics to shorter windows for its latest theatrical releases.

Vintage cinema may be niche but it’s inexplicable that a streaming service with Disney’s legacy, for instance, doesn’t exploit its vast vault of 20th Century Fox greats rather than licensing modern movies from other studios.

It’s indicative of how the NZ market is woefully under-served, both on air and on-demand, when it comes to rediscovering movies released from the 1920s-1970s — save for Prime Video’s quirky back catalogue mix of MGM classics, curiosities and eccentricities.

Kudos to Disney+ for recently updating The Sound of Music to 4K-UHD but why not Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid or Tombstone, which continue to languish in HD (despite the former’s 4K availability of Apple TV and the latter’s 4K-UHD Blu-ray release in the US).

Don’t expect HBO Max to open the floodgates to 4K remasters but in Australia it does offer a TCM-lite tile for film buffs and hopefully that will be an option here.

Here’s what The Nightly reported when HBO Max Australia launched last year:

The highlight of the Max movie library though has to be its Turner Classic Movies (TCM) sb-brand. Here is where you’ll find veritable classics such as Singin’ in the Rain, Dial M for Murder, North by Northwest, Rebel Without a Cause, The Maltese Falcon, Mrs Miniver, The Philadelphia Story, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gaslight, The Big Sleep and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

The TCM library also was highlighted in a recent PC Mag review of the US site.

Chances are we’ll also see new releases on-demand quicker. Case in point: Oscar-nominee One Battle After Another, which went from cinemas to HBO Max in the US and Australia in 84 days.

Under Sky’s HBO Max model, a movie like the latest Superman that landed on HBO Max on September 19 has still to surface here on the platform (possibly because of Sky’s Box Office rentals window).

Otherwise, expect much the same content as on Sky’s HBO Max service, as programming is largely the same internationally save for regional variations (ie. Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, The Last of Us, The Penguin, The Pitt, the Harry Potter and DC Universes …).

As for subscriptions, plans will range from Basic (with ads) to Premium (ad-free with 4K streams that can be viewed on up to four devices).

They’ll probably be priced from around $15 a month to $25 (with annual options) — although to get a foothold in a crowded streaming market here the rates may need to be sharper.

While HBO Max and Sky are cutting ties, in Australia HBO Max is available via Foxtel and Prime Video as add-ons.

There has been customer blowback in Australia about the intrusiveness of ads in the Basic plan, including complaints they not only interrupt mid-scene but also mid-sentence!

“But if you’re simply searching for the best quality viewing for your dollar HBO Max is the way to go,” one Australian reviewer says.

In the meantime, HBO Max this week announced it was doubling down on cracking down on password sharing.

WBD added more than 12 million foreign paid streaming subscribers in the fourth quarter to end the year with 72.4 million.

“We are in the second inning of our password sharing enforcement,” JB Perrette, CEO and president of global streaming,” says.

“It is just beginning to get scale. It has not expanded globally at all. That will start in 2026.”