Sky’s HBO Fades to Black

HBO literally does fade to black tonight on Sky when it leaves the platform after nearly 15 years.

From tomorrow, HBO Max will be available to stream as a direct-to-consumer service.

The NZ Herald reported Friday that Sky had rejected the opportunity to continue to carry HBO programming, as Foxtel does in Australia, to completely go its own way.

Warner Bros Discovery ANZ managing director Michael Brooks told NZH he had been hoping for a similar deal in NZ:

We indicated many months ago that we were always planning to go direct to consumer – that was a clear conversation that we had with Sky.

In Australia, we had a similar situation with Foxtel, whereby we had a long-standing partnership. The content was licensed there for many years, and we managed to work with them to create a wholesale hard bundle where essentially their customers would be able to get uninterrupted access to HBO content.

We were certainly happy to have the same conversation and create a similar deal with Sky, but they made the decision to go in a different direction.

Sky’s response per NZH: “Our decision not to pursue a co-exclusive arrangement for HBO Max content was grounded in data and our insights into what our customers watch and value.

“We’ve chosen to invest in a diverse range of content that we know our customers love, through a broad range of studio partnerships, including Paramount, BBC, Studiocanal and Sony to name a few.”

HBO has been pivotal to Sky since 2011, when it launched the SoHo channel with the belated NZ premiere of Game of Thrones.

As I wrote at the time: “With Sky now in half the country’s homes, and sports and movie subscriptions nearing saturation level, the pay-TV operator is well placed to win new subscribers by capitalising on disenchantment with the quality and quantity of free-to-air prime-time drama.”

Sky would use HBO content as the backbone of SoHo’s schedule, and charge subscribers an extra $10 a month premium, until finally dropping the double pay-wall, replacing SoHo with the HBO linear channel, and making HBO Max fare one of the key building blocks of streaming service Neon and the new Sky Box.

But as of tomorrow, none of this content will be on Sky — although WBD channels like Discovery and CNN will continue. As WB’s rascally mascot might remark, “That’s all, folks!”