Max Drops Streaming Price To Ridiculous Low, Streaming Wars Heating Up?

The deal applies solely to Max’s ad-supported streaming tier, regularly $9.99 a month. New and returning Max subscribers can do their streaming for $2.99 a month for six months. After that, the price will return to $9.99.

Sadly, Max customers who prefer ad-free streaming will still have to pay between $15.99 and $19.99 a month for their subscriptions. This comes as all the major streamers are jacking up the price of their ad-free offerings while attempting to lure customers to cheaper ad-supported plans. In essence, streamers have, over the course of the last 10 or so years, progressed to the point where they’ve somehow managed to invent cable 2.0—the very thing they were supposed to be an alternative to.

Despite the fact that subscribing to five or six streamers for $10 a month with commercials is the same thing as paying for a basic cable package, the plan seems to be working. Netflix recently announced that their lower-priced, ad-supported plan has netted them 15 million subscribers—triple where they were in may—in its first year of availability. There’s no reason to think that Max won’t boast similar numbers for their cheaper, ad-supported streaming option, especially with the help of this new Black Friday deal.

If this new price decrease is an attempt by Max to win the “streaming wars,” it’s certainly an about-face for a company that’s been trying its hardest to get people to stop using its service.

First, Warner Bros. started shelving completed projects headed to Max, like the hotly anticipated Batgirl and the Scoob! sequel. Then, the entertainment conglomerate changed the name of their streamer from HBO Max to just plain Max, a decision that confused customers and seemed to make no financial sense whatsoever. Now, Warner Bros. is putting all of its previously exclusive DC content—one of the big reasons for fans to subscribe to Max in the first place—on other streaming services like Amazon Prime and Netflix.

There’s even a completely original Batman Christmas movie, Merry Little Batman, coming to Amazon Prime in December that won’t be available on Max whatsoever. That’s an exclusive animated film featuring one of Warner Bros.’s most lucrative properties that the studio, for whatever reason, decided to give to their competition instead of airing it themselves.

Between Max pushing customers away and the other streaming services raising their prices for commercial-free content astronomically in a bid to get you to adopt an ad-supported model that’s no different from the cable and broadcast TV that streamers replaced, there’s one thing movie and television fans can agree on: no matter which service wins the streaming wars, we all lose.