HBO Max cuts prices after Amazon Channels split



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Presentation… HBO Max!

Presentation… HBO Max!
Photo: Presley Ann / Getty Images for WarnerMedia

In recent years, relationships between streaming services and the various companies responsible for transporting their content to people’s real TVs have become around as turbulent and bitter as cable wars have ever been; we have seen god knows how many arguments are breaking out lately between providers like HBO Max or peacock and companies like Year, whose ostensibly symbiotic arrangements frequently break down into screaming arguments about who deserves a part of what. All of these negotiations only get complicated when you factor in Amazon (which is in a very big, similar boat with Apple), which is both a leading provider of its own content and, both through its Fire TV hardware and Channels feature on Amazon Prime—A platform that its competitors inevitably have to do with.

Or not, in the case of HBO, which announced a bold price change following its decision to remove HBO Max from Prime. Channel library. (It will still be available through the Fire side of things, until then, as it’s pretty darn hard to avoid. all Leviathan tentacle.) Users who previously accessed HBO Max through their Amazon Prime channels (which allows users to easily subscribe to various libraries of premium content) will be able to purchase up to a six-month full subscription at half the price of $ 7.49, which, given Max is far from the high-end of streaming service pricing levels, is a pretty big drop.

Why leave the chains in the first place, though, given that Deadline reports WarnerMedia service set to lose 5 million subscribers as part of the move? It all comes down to data, the digital macguffin of the modern world. When Time-Warner (back in the days before it merged with AT&T to go from a “horribly big media company” to a market saturation “mass of festering content”) initially struck its deals to try and push its prized HBO content library on the already ubiquitous Amazon Prime, it had to be pretty forgiving about the amount of customer data Amazon was allowed to suck through its corporate trunk. But what was acceptable, from a commercial streaming perspective, in the mid-2010s is quite outdated now, and so Warner has decided to take the hit and cut some of its subscriber base by removing Max from Channels.

All of this translates to you, the consumer, like this: You might be able to get HBO Max cheaper for a while, in exchange for a little more difficult access. AAnd if that’s not the modern condition, what is it?

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