Listen up, HBO fans out there, I have some bad news for you: you’re about to shell out more money to watch your favorite shows. Yes, the streaming price hikes have hit again.
The transformed subscription tiers are as follows:
HBO Max Basic With Ads
Monthly: +$1/month increase, now $10.99
Annually: +$10/year increase, now $109.99
HBO Max Standard
Monthly: +$1.50/month increase, now $18.49
Annual: +$15/year increase, now $184.99
HBO Max Premium
Monthly: +$2/month increase, $22.99
Annual: +$20/year increase, now $229.99
New subscribers will see these price hikes go into effect immediately, while current subscribers will feel their wallets impacted on their next billing date within 30 days of notification of the increases. Annual subscribers will not feel the hurt until their subscriptions are up for renewal. The service previously raised prices about a year ago.
When it comes to price gouging, the streaming services have really been pushing it lately—and it often seems like they’re just seeing how much they can get away with. In the halcyon days of early streaming, you could watch a TV show, uninterrupted by adverts, for a cool $8 a month. Then came the price hikes. Then came the ads. Then came additional price hikes, and more ads, and so on and so forth, and now, it seems we may be in a vicious cycle that can only be stopped when the streamers of the world rise up and take some sort of collective action.
The streaming service is currently called HBO Max. Previously, it was Max, and before that, it was HBO Max, and before that, it was HBO Go. There’s also been an HBO Now, but that’s a slightly separate thing. Despite all the idiotically iterative branding efforts of its corporate overlords, HBO is still the single greatest producer of television in the history of the medium. The same company that brought us The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, and Succession, just launched a new Tim Robinson show (it’s called The Chair Company), so I don’t really care what you call it, just so long as you keep it coming. But for God’s sake, people, let’s cool it on the prices.
