AT&T still owned WarnerMedia when it launched HBO Max in 2020, and as a smart play to trick people into checking out Doctor Who and the Studio Ghibli canon and all of those bad DCEU movies that the service launched with, AT&T offered free HBO Max subscriptions to pretty much anyone who was paying them a monthly fee for anything—be it a wireless plan for your phone or an internet plan for your house. But with AT&T offloading WarnerMedia, which has since combined with Discovery to form an exciting new super-company that exists just to kill streaming services, cancel things, and lay people off.
With that new super-company came the natural assumption that the days were numbered for the sweet AT&T/HBO Max deal, since it’s no longer about vertical integration (keeping consumers in the AT&T ecosystem by giving them an AT&T-owned streaming service) but simply… AT&T doing a nice thing for people and for a company it no longer owns. That’s not how businesses work, not in Uncle Sam’s America! Nobody gets anything for free unless its part of a cross-promotional marketing scheme!
And now, sure enough, AT&T has killed the HBO Max bundle for one of its wireless plans. As noted by Variety, this seems to have only impacted the “highest-tier unlimited wireless plan,” and apparently only new customers at that, but it does prove that this is something that’s now on the table for AT&T going forward.
The silver lining for current AT&T subscribers wary about losing their HBO Max access is that the company is quietly doing this as part of rebranding its top unlimited plan, which was called Unlimited Elite but is now Unlimited Premium. That means it technically has yet to remove the HBO Max bundle from any tier, it’s just getting rid of a wireless plan that had the HBO Max bundle.
