HBO Max Is Here: Check If You May Already Be Subscribed

Warner Media’s confusingly named HBO Max service has arrived in the US at last, launching with every episode of Friends, all the Harry Potter movies and what appears to be a late night show hosted by Elmo.

Like millions of you out there, I am already subscribed to HBO for $15 a month. HBO Max costs $15 a month, and contains HBO content, plus a whole lot of other stuff now that it’s gone full-on streaming service. But do you need to subscribe to both? Or does your current HBO subscription carry over?

It’s…sort of complicated.

I am going to try to parse this as best I can, as I went through this process myself this morning. Here’s my specific example.

1. I have HBO through an add-on to Hulu since I don’t use cable.
2. I went to the HBO Max site and clicked the option to sign in with a cable provider or other service.
3. I logged in via the Hulu button and that was it, I do in fact have an HBO Max subscription, and checking my billing information, I am still being charged $15 a month through Hulu, not $30 now, for access.

So, how does this work for you and whatever service you have HBO from?

If you have HBO through:

• HBO Now (the standalone version of HBO)
• Apple
• Google

And your subscription says your “billing provider” is one of those, you do indeed have HBO Max “for free” (for your current subscription price).

If you have HBO through a streaming service or cable provider, there’s a list of “valid” ones:

• DirecTV/AT&T TV
• Hulu
• Altice (Optimum and SuddenLink)
• YouTube TV
• Charter/Spectrum
• Verizon
• Cox Communications
• NCTC (WOW!, Atlantic Broadband, RCN, Grande Communications & Wave, and MCTV)

So all of those should work if you sign in through them and AT&T customers specifically seem to have some level of free trial/access to Max content that other places don’t. But there is also a “blacklist” of providers where for whatever reason, competition, streaming or cable rivalries, etc, if you have HBO through one of them, you do not have HBO Max and would have to subscribe separately:

So, Fire and Roku devices you’ve signed up HBO through won’t work. And Comcast is obviously a huge cable provider so this affects millions who have HBO through them. Given that AT&T is a main rival to Comcast, this is not surprising, albeit annoying. Presumably the play here is to cancel HBO on Comcast and then sign up for it via HBO Max itself for the same price, “unlocking” it.

This is actually a bit less complicated than it looks in the end. If you currently have HBO through pretty much any provider other than Comcast, Amazon or Roku, you should have HBO Max and its content for free if you log in with your existing info. If not, drop HBO from those services, get Max by itself.

Now, time to watch 800 episodes of Friends, I guess.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Pick up my new sci-fi novel Herokiller, and read my first series, The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook.