AT&T’s most recent subscriber figures cause it to seem like HBO and its sister service HBO Max are doing admirably — incredible, even! In a regulatory filing this week, AT&T uncovered that it beat its projected year-end goal with 73.8 million total subscribers between HBO and HBO Max (even after its breakup with Amazon).

Yet, that success comes following a time of highly expected film debuts intended to expand subscriber numbers, it’s still tens of millions of subscribers behind rivals like Disney Plus and Netflix. The numbers likewise accompany a few pretty enormous caveats. In other words, hold the adulation.

For one’s purposes, AT&T’s figures (prior detailed) conflate two separate services — HBO, its cable business, and HBO Max, its streaming service — and they don’t separate the number of subscribers each help has individually. WarnerMedia representative Jaclyn Mandelbaum let The Verge know that more data “will be broken out in AT&T’s earnings in a couple weeks” yet declined to indicate figures for each service.

AT&T’s development likewise looks less great given the high-profile content record it served throughout the last year, including titles like Dune, The Matrix Resurrections, and the third season of Succession. On top of that, HBO Max added a lower-priced tier and launched internationally mostly as the year progressed — the two of which ought to have helped support its subscribers considerably.

Disney Plus added over two times as numerous subscribers throughout a comparable time-frame. Disney’s streaming service, which launched approximately a half year before HBO Max, detailed 118.1 million paid subscribers as of October 2021, up from 73.7 million with regards to a year sooner. HBO’s 73.8 million record, then again, is just up from 61 million subscribers all around the world toward the finish of 2020.

Streaming information is virtually difficult to handle on a one-for-one correlation level for bunch reasons, not the least of which being that everybody is playing by various rules. That is to avoid even mentioning how piracy, account-sharing, and features like auto-play can altogether slant a really precise image of subscriber and title achievement.

Last year should’ve been HBO Max’s year to win. It will need to track down better approaches to develop without the assistance of an exceptionally expected day-and-date slate.