The CEO defended the removal of HBO and HBO Max from Prime Video’s list of add-on channels in September 2021. “Better to have (customers) where you have direct access control of them, can market to them, know what they’re doing than to have it be in some black box where you absolutely have no idea what somebody else is doing with aggregating your content and your exposure to the customer,” he said (via The Streamable). “At the end of the day, you want full control of your customers. And I’m confident with the strength of the offer that will be in the market, those customers are all going to come back into the offer.”
HBO Max currently has around 47 million subscribers as per AT&T
Going by the figures provided by AT&T during its Q4 2021 earnings call, there are around 46.8 million subscribers of HBO Max in the U.S. By comparison, the subscriber figures just before its removal from Prime Video were marginally higher at 47 million. AT&T was quite confident in its ability to recover the 5 million lost customers due to the removal of its services from Prime Video last year. But customers who really want to enjoy HBO content wouldn’t mind switching to its standalone app.
