America is populated by roughly 319 million people. More than 2 million of them have HBO Now subscriptions, Jeff Bewkes boasted on Wednesday.
The Time Warner chairman and CEO unveiled the number on a conference call for his company’s fourth quarter of fiscal 2016. Subscription video-on-demand service HBO Now is only two years old, so Bewkes is quite pleased with those early returns.
Having “Game of Thrones” certainly doesn’t hurt his efforts, and the launch of “Westworld” also helped attract a paying audience. That Anthony Hopkins series especially attracted customers in droves — its freshman run turned out to be the most-watched first season of any show in HBO’s history, per the premium TV network. The new technology directly helped that claim, of course.
In 2016, HBO launched over-the-top (OTT) products on Microsoft’s Xbox platforms, new Samsung smart TVs, Sony’s PlayStation platforms and Amazon Prime Channels. In 2016, HBO also launched an OTT service in Spain and HBO Latin America launched them in Brazil and Argentina.
Financially, HBO’s parent company enjoyed a strong Q4, with Turner and studio Warner Bros. also contributing to the bottom line. Read all about Time Warner’s full-year and most-recent quarterly earnings here.
Bewkes reiterated on Wednesday that his company’s merger with AT&T is still on schedule to close in 2017.