Following Disney+, HBO Max is the latest big studio streaming service to launch – but don’t expect this one in the UK.
Yesterday, Warner Bros formally announced the launch date for its own entry into the streaming service battle, HBO Max. The service is set to be home to movies from the studio and its subsidiaries, for new and old shows from HBO, and it’ll be the US home of Doctor Who too.
Furthermore, shows from CNN, TNT, Turner Classic Movies, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim and more are included. In all, around 10,000 hours of material is promised. Which should get us all through a week of this ongoing lockdown.
The service is launching in the US on May 27th 2020, with a monthly price of $14.95. And yet, as things stands, there are no firm plans to bring it to the UK at all.
Just a few weeks ago, the UK finally got the launch of the Disney+ streaming service. It had been held back over here in large part down to the requirement for existing rights deals to come to an end.
In the case of HBO Max, rather than wait for those deals to expire, Warner Bros has instead extended its agreements with Sky and Now TV. That means that the shows that are going to the streaming service in the US will come to us via existing Sky infrastructure in the UK.
The chance of HBO Max launching in the UK in the next year is pretty much zero, beyond that it remains slim.
We’ll keep you posted if that changes, of course. But don’t expect it to…
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