HBO
Home Box Office is an American premium television network and service, which is the flagship property of namesake parent-subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc., itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The overall Home Box Office business unit is based at Warner Bros. Discovery's corporate headquarters inside 30 Hudson Yards in Manhattan. Programming featured on the service consists primarily of theatrically released motion pictures and original television programs as well as made-for-cable movies, documentaries, occasional comedy, and concert specials, and periodic interstitial programs.
HBO is the oldest subscription television service in the United States still in operation, as well as the country's first cable-originated television content service. HBO pioneered modern pay television upon its launch on November 8, 1972: it was the first television service to be directly transmitted and distributed to individual cable television systems, and was the conceptual blueprint for the "premium channel", pay television services sold to subscribers for an extra monthly fee that do not accept traditional advertising and present their programming without editing for objectionable material. It eventually became the first television channel in the world to begin transmitting via satellite—expanding the growing regional pay service, originally available to cable and multipoint distribution service providers in the northern Mid-Atlantic and southern New England, into a national television service—in September 1975, and, alongside sister channel Cinemax, was among the first two American pay television services to offer complimentary multiplexed channels in August 1991.
The service operates six 24-hour, linear multiplex channels as well as a traditional subscription video on demand platform and its content is the centerpiece of HBO Max, an expanded streaming platform operated separately from but sharing management with Home Box Office, Inc., which also includes original programming produced exclusively for the service and content from other Warner Bros. Discovery properties. Since December 4, 2024, livestreams of most of HBO's linear feeds are accessible on the Max streaming app to American subscribers of its Ad-Free and Ultimate Ad-Free tiers. Linear East or West Coast HBO channel feeds are also available via Max's a la carte add-ons sold through Prime Video Channels, YouTube Primetime Channels, The Roku Channel and virtual pay television providers Hulu and YouTube TV.
, HBO's programming was available to approximately 35.656 million U.S. households that had a subscription to a multichannel television provider, giving it the largest subscriber total of any American premium channel. In addition to its U.S. subscriber base, HBO distributes its programming content in at least 151 countries worldwide to, as of 2018, an estimated 140 million cumulative subscribers.
History
Cable television executive Charles Dolan—through his company, Sterling Information Services—founded Manhattan Cable TV Services, a cable system franchise serving an Upper Manhattan section of New York City, which began limited service in September 1966. Manhattan Cable was notable for being the first urban underground cable television system to operate in the United States.With external expenses resulting in consistent financial losses, in the summer of 1971, while on a family vacation to France aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2, a desperate Dolan—wanting to help Sterling Manhattan turn profitable and to prevent Time-Life, Inc. from pulling its investment in the system—developed a proposal for a cable-originated television channel. Codenamed "The Green Channel", the conceptual subscription service would offer unedited theatrical movies licensed from the major Hollywood film studios and live sporting events, all presented without interruptions by advertising and sold for a flat monthly fee to prospective subscribers. On November 2, 1971, Time Inc.'s board of directors approved the "Green Channel" proposal, agreeing to give Dolan a $150,000 development grant for the project.
Time-Life and Sterling Communications soon proposed for the "Sterling Cable Network" to be the name of the new service. Discussions to change the service's name took place during a later meeting of Dolan and the executive staff he hired to assist in developing the project, who ultimately settled on calling it "Home Box Office", which was meant to convey to potential customers that the service would be their "ticket" to movies and events that they could see in their own home.
Home Box Office launched at 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time on November 8, 1972, initially available to subscribers of Teleservice Cable in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. HBO's inaugural program and event telecast, a National Hockey League game between the New York Rangers and the Vancouver Canucks from Madison Square Garden, was transmitted that evening over channel 21—its original assigned channel on the Teleservice system—to its initial base of 365 subscribers in Wilkes-Barre. The first movie presentation shown on the service aired immediately after the hockey game concluded: the 1971 film Sometimes a Great Notion, starring Paul Newman and Henry Fonda.
Channels
Background
To reduce subscriber churn by offering extra programming choices to subscribers, on May 8, 1991, Home Box Office Inc. announced plans to launch two additional channels of HBO and Cinemax, becoming the first subscription television services to launch "multiplexed" companion channels, each available at no extra charge to subscribers of one or both networks. On August 1, 1991, through a test launch of the three channels over those systems, TeleCable customers in Overland Park, Kansas; Racine, Wisconsin; and suburban Dallas that subscribed to either service began receiving two additional HBO channels or a secondary channel of Cinemax. HBO2, HBO3, and Cinemax 2 each offered distinct schedules of programs culled from HBO and Cinemax's movie and original programming libraries separate from offerings shown concurrently on their respective parent primary channels. While most cable providers collectively offered the HBO and Cinemax multiplex channels in individual tiers, some providers had sold their secondary or tertiary channels as optional add-ons to expanded basic subscribers; this practice was discontinued when HBO and Cinemax began migrating to digital cable in the early 2000s, as the respective multiplex channels were being packaged in each tier mandatorily.In February 1996, in anticipation of the adoption of MPEG-2 digital compression codecs that would allow cable providers to offer digital cable service, Home Box Office, Inc. announced plans to expand its multiplex services across HBO and Cinemax to twelve channels, encompassing a fourth HBO channel and two additional Cinemax channels, originally projected for a spring 1997 launch. The HBO multiplex expanded to include a fourth channel on December 1, 1996, with the launch of HBO Family, focusing on family-oriented feature films and television series aimed at younger children.
Home Box Office, Inc. began marketing the HBO channel suite and related coastal feeds under the umbrella brand "MultiChannel HBO" in September 1994; the package was rebranded as "HBO The Works", now exclusively classified to the four HBO multiplex channels, in April 1998. Concurrent with the adoption of "The Works" package brand, two of the channels changed their names and formats: HBO2 was rebranded as HBO Plus, and HBO3 was relaunched as HBO Signature, incorporating content catering toward a female audience, alongside theatrical films aimed at broader audiences and content from HBO's original made-for-cable movie and documentary libraries.
On May 6, 1999, the HBO multiplex expanded to include two new thematic channels: HBO Comedy, featuring comedic feature films, comedy series from HBO's original programming library, and recent and archived HBO comedy specials, and HBO Zone, aimed at young adults between the ages of 18 and 34, offering theatrical movies; comedy and alternative series, and documentaries from HBO's original programming library; and music videos. The HBO multiplex expansion concluded when HBO Latino, a Spanish language network, was launched on November 1, 2000; it features a mix of dubbed simulcasts of programming from the primary HBO channel as well as exclusive Spanish-originated programs.
List of HBO channels
Depending on the service provider, HBO provides up to six 24-hour multiplex channels, as well as a subscription video-on-demand service known as HBO On Demand. Off-the-air maintenance periods of anywhere from a half-hour up to two hours occur at varied overnight/early morning time slots once per month on each channel.HBO transmits feeds of its six channels on both Eastern and Pacific Time Zone schedules. The respective coastal feeds of each channel are usually packaged together, resulting in the difference in local airtimes for a particular movie or program between two geographic locations being three hours at most; the opposite-region feed serves as a timeshift channel, allowing viewers who may have missed a particular program at its original local airtime to watch it three hours after its initial airing or allowing them to watch a program up to four hours, depending on the applicable time zone, in advance of their local airtime on their corresponding primary coastal feed.
HBO maintains a separate feed for the Hawaii–Aleutian Time Zone operating a three-hour-delayed version of the primary channel's Pacific Time feed for subscribers of Oceanic Spectrum, which otherwise transmits Pacific Time feeds for the five other HBO multiplex channels.
Current channels
Former channels
Current sister channels
Cinemax
Cinemax is an American pay television network owned by the Home Box Office, Inc. subsidiary of Warner Bros. Discovery. Originally developed as a companion service to HBO, the channel's programming consists of recent and some older theatrically released feature films, original action drama series, documentaries, and special behind-the-scenes featurettes. While Cinemax and HBO operate as separate premium services, their respective channel tiers are very frequently sold as a combined package by many multichannel television providers; however, customers have the option of subscribing to HBO and Cinemax's corresponding channel packages individually.On August 1, 1980, HBO launched Cinemax, a companion movie-based premium channel created as a direct competitor to two existing movie-focused premium channels: The Movie Channel, then a smaller, standalone pay movie service owned by Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment, and Home Theater Network, a now-defunct service owned by Group W Satellite Communications that focused on G- and PG-rated films. Cinemax succeeded in its early years partly because it relied on classic movie releases from the 1950s to the 1970s that it presented uncut and without commercial interruption, at a time when limited headend channel capacity resulted in cable subscribers only being able to receive as many as three dozen channels. In most cases, cable operators tended to sell Cinemax and HBO as a singular premium bundle, usually offered at a discount for customers that decided to subscribe to both channels. Cinemax, unlike HBO, also maintained a 24-hour schedule from its launch, one of the first pay cable services to transmit around the clock.
Even in its early years, Cinemax tried to diversify its programming beyond movies. Beginning in 1984, it incorporated music specials and some limited original programming into the channel's schedule. Around this time, Cinemax also began airing adult-oriented softcore pornographic films and series in varying late-night timeslots ; this programming block, originally airing under the "Friday After Dark" banner, would become strongly associated with the channel among its subscribers and in pop culture. The channel began gradually scaling back its adult programming offerings in 2011, in an effort to shift focus towards its mainstream films and original programs, culminating in the removal of "Max After Dark" content from its linear and on-demand platforms in 2018, as part of a broader exit from the genre across Home Box Office, Inc.'s platforms. In terms of mainstream programming, Cinemax began premiering original action series in the early 2010s, beginning with the August 2011 premiere of Strike Back. As a consequence of WarnerMedia reallocating its programming resources toward the HBO Max streaming service, Cinemax eliminated scripted programming after the last of its remaining slate of action series ended in early 2021, shifting the channel back to its original structure as a movie-exclusive premium service.
The linear Cinemax multiplex service, as of 2025, consists of the primary feed and four thematic channels: MoreMax ; ActionMax ; Cinemáx and 5StarMax.