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AT&T’s goal in unveiling HBO Max to Wall Street analysts on Tuesday was clear and unmistakable: Blow them away with with detailed plans, big franchises, and a fresh user experience, and do it for HBO’s current pricing.

The presentation by AT&T and WarnerMedia execs on the storied Hollywood soundstage where Warner Bros. filmed Judy Garland’s A Star Is Born and NBC’s ER was methodical and meticulous, surprisingly revealing, and precise on benchmarks for those Wall Street analysts to measure HBO Max’s progress.

AT&T’s subscriber targets for HBO Max are fairly modest — grow HBO’s 34 million U.S. subscribers to 50 million HBO Max subscribers by the end of 2025 — but the company’s ambition for the service isn’t so much to take on Netflix, Hulu and the other streamers as take on satellite and cable service. HBO Max wants to be TV.

If that sounds like hype or hyperbole, consider AT&T’s plans:

HBO Max will launch in May 2020 on all the usual smartphone and TV platforms for $14.99 a month. That’s the current price as the HBO Now app and HBO on Amazon Channels, Apple TV Channels, Roku Channels and TV providers like Comcast Xfinity and Charter Spectrum.
At launch, HBO Max will include 10,000 hours of programming — TV shows, movies, documentaries, children’s programming, etc. — from Warner Bros., New Line, DC, CNN, TNT, TBS, truTV, Turner Classic Movies, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Crunchyroll, Rooster Teeth, Loony Tunes and other outlets.
The TV catalog will have previously announced big-deal shows like Friends, The Big Bang Theory, and Pretty Little Liars plus South Park, Rick and Morty, The O.C. and The West Wing announced on Tuesday.
The film catalog will have 1,800 titles, including Joker, Aquaman, The Matrix, Casablanca and The Wizard of Oz. Considering WarnerMedia’s enormous library of classic films that stocks Turner Classic Movies and stocked the former Filmstruck service, HBO Max’s catalog of classic films will be best in class.
There will be many, many originals — 38 HBO originals and 31 HBO Max originals in 2020, and even more in 2021 — including the surprise announcement of HBO’s straight-to-series order of House of the Dragon, a Game of Thrones series co-created by George R.R. Martin.
Within the first year after launch, AT&T plans to make an ad-supported version of HBO Max available to more price-conscious consumers. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has said that HBO Max would eventually include live sports and news, but those won’t be a part of the service at launch.

HBO Max Is HBO Plus a Lot More

I’ve been more bullish on Apple TV+ and Disney+ over the last few months than I’ve been on HBO Max.

Apple TV+ is $4.99 a month — free for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV buyers — has a handful of originals with big budgets and big stars and is backed by the marketing might of the biggest company in the world. Disney+ is $6.99 a month — free for Verizon subscribers — has a bigger list of originals with big budgets and big stars and the catalogs of maybe the four biggest franchises in film and TV: Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar and Disney.

My reservations about HBO Max coming into the presentation were that the $14.99-a-month price point for HBO was already more expensive than any of its streaming competitors and had maxed out its penetration of 34 million U.S. households. That’s still my reservation — $14.99 is $2 a month more than Netflix — but the presentation set a compelling narrative that HBO Max will be HBO plus a lot more for the price of HBO.

“An SVOD service may have 35,000 hours of content, but half of their usage is driven by only the top 100 titles,” WarnerMedia exec Kevin Reilly said during the presentation, citing research firm MoffattNathanson’s analysis of Netflix and Prime Video viewing. “The top ten licensed comedies on competitive streamers account for more than 80% of the total licensed comedy viewing. So breadth of choice is important, but content that matters to viewers is the real point of differentiation.”

HBO Max won’t just have good catalog shows; it will have Friends (the No. 2 licensed show on Netflix), The Big Bang Theory (a huge broadcast hit that’s never been on streaming), South Park (the No. 2 licensed show on Hulu), and Rick and Morty (an Adult Swim hit renewed last year for 70 episodes). That’s four hit shows, and three of them are moving to HBO Max from competitors that wanted to keep them.

HBO Is From Mars; HBO Max Is From Venus

The most compelling slide in the two-and-a-half-hour presentation (above) depicted shows from WarnerMedia’s cable and digital properties as dots denoting the age and gender of the viewers. Across age and gender, WarnerMedia was thinnest is programming for younger viewers and women. The HBO Max originals — the black dots on the chart — fill in those gaps.

“We will have one of the most robust collections of superb SVOD content that will appeal to all demographics in the household,” WarnerMedia exec Bob Greenblatt said during the presentation, walking through each network’s demographics. “You can see how, in aggregate, we will have very broad coverage across all four quadrants. And as we get past Year 1, this will only continue to balance out as more shows are introduced.”

HBO Max is building its catalog for a big audience by making sure there’s plenty of content there for every kind of viewer. That’s straight out of the Netflix playbook, and HBO Max is built very much like Netflix with a big, varied database of shows and sophisticated algorithms to help you find another show to watch and another one after that.

In a streaming market with shiny objects like Apple TV+’s The Morning Show, Disney+’s The Mandalorian and Prime Video’s upcoming Lord of the Rings series to entice viewers, services need deep catalogs to attract and keep an audience and make sure mom, dad and the kids are all invested in subscribing to the service month after month.

HBO Max’s Interface Looks Familiar — But Better

HBO Max showed a user interface of horizontal rows with names like “My List” and “New and Returning Shows” that’s similar to Netflix, Comcast Xfinity, Prime Video, Apple’s TV app and other video services. What’s different about HBO Max is how the interface guides you to discover movies and TV shows and how your individual selections and viewing factor into those rows.

The top row, “Recommended by Humans,” includes photos of Regina King, Zac Efron, Bill Hader and others you could click to see their recommendations and some personal videos about particular titles. The next row is a carousel of new and noteworthy titles like The Flight Attendant, an HBO Max original series starring Kaley Cuoco. Then there’s rows like “Continue Watching,” “My List” and “New and Returning Shows” that you see on most video apps. There are also collections like romantic comedies and Friends episodes.

For users who are interested in particular channels like Loony Tunes or DC Universe, HBO Max has a menu of what it calls “hubs” for each of those brands. Profiles are easy to create and manage, and you can set age-appropriate guidelines on children’s profiles. There are also podcasts built directly into the service like HBO’s popular Chernobyl Podcast that you can listen to on your smartphone.

Overall, HBO Max has the makings of a top-tier streamer that will compare favorably to Netflix when it launches in May 2020, will likely get a price drop with an ad-supported version within the first year, and will eventually take on traditional TV with the additional of news and sports.

Scott Porch writes about the TV business for Decider and is a contributing writer for The Daily Beast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.