HBO Max launched a limited-time annual subscription sale on Thursday that cuts yearly plan prices by 40 percent, the biggest discount the service has offered in recent memory, timed to coincide with the premiere of House of the Dragon Season 3 on Sunday and the looming Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger that is expected to change what the service looks like before the end of the year.
The sale runs from June 18 to July 15 and is available to both new subscribers and returning ones who subscribe directly through hbomax.com.
The prices are straightforward: the Basic With Ads annual plan drops to $78.99 for the first year, the Standard ad-free plan drops to $132.99 and the Premium plan, four simultaneous streams, 4K, drops to $164.99.
After the first year, pricing returns to the normal annual rates of $109.99, $184.99 and $229.99 respectively.
At the Basic tier, $78.99 for a year works out to under $6.60 a month. At Standard, $132.99 comes to under $11.10 a month.
The regular monthly prices for those same tiers are $10.99 and $18.49, so the annual deal, even before this extra promotion, was already significantly cheaper.
The 40 percent total discount pushes it into territory that is genuinely difficult to justify ignoring if you watch the service at all.
The Two Reasons This Is Happening Now
House of the Dragon Season 3 premiered Sunday, the return of the Game of Thrones prequel series that has been one of HBO's most watched original productions.
Locking in a year of subscribers before the new season's run is the standard streaming promotion playbook, and Max is executing it aggressively.
The more unusual motivator is the Paramount merger. The DOJ and FCC cleared Paramount Skydance's $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery in June.
The deal is expected to close in September. What happens to HBO Max and Paramount+ after that closing has not been publicly detailed, Paramount executives have said they expect the services to merge or combine in some form, but specifics about pricing, availability and content library changes have not been announced.
What that uncertainty creates is a specific incentive to subscribe now.
If you lock in $78.99 for a year at the current HBO Max terms and the service changes significantly after the merger, you have twelve months of whatever the current service offers at a 40 percent discount.
If the merger produces a combined service that costs more, costs the same or changes the content library in ways you do not prefer, you have locked in before any of that happened.
The deal expires July 15. House of the Dragon is running. The merger is coming.