In an earnings call this morning, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes announced that HBO Now — HBO’s $14.99-per-month OTT service that doesn’t require a traditional TV package, and which serves as the network’s competitor to Netflix and Hulu — has surpassed 2 million subscribers nationwide.
HBO Now launched in April 2015 and had clocked roughly 800,000 subscribers by the end of 2015, falling short of expectations at the time. “We’re really pleased with the progress,” Bewkes said of the service on an earnings call today, in which Time Warner beat analyst expectations, propelled largely by the Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them. Bewkes said that marketing and distribution partnerships struck last year between HBO Now and Amazon, Xbox, Samsung, and Playstation also largely responsible for subscriber growth.
HBO’s chairman and CEO Richard Plepler added that the churn rate for HBO Now — or the annual rate at which consumers have cancelled their subscriptions — is at its lowest since the service launched. “It speaks to the quality of the content and the range of content,” he said on the earnings call, per Variety.
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Time Warner, which owns HBO in addition to Turner Broadcasting and Warner Bros., is in the process of being acquired by AT&T in a deal reportedly worth $85 billion — though newly-installed President Donald Trump has expressed his opposition to the deal.
