HBO Max won’t hit AT&T data caps, but Netflix and Disney Plus will

HBO Max, AT&T’s big bet on the future of streaming, will be excused from AT&T’s mobile data caps, while competing services like Netflix and Disney Plus will use up your data. Tony Goncalves, the AT&T executive in charge of HBO Max, when asked whether HBO Max would hit the cap said his team “had the conversation” but didn’t have the answer. AT&T later confirmed that HBO Max will be excused from the company’s traditional data caps and the soft data caps on unlimited plans. HBO Max is using AT&T’s “sponsored data” system, which technically allows any company to pay to excuse its services from data caps. But since AT&T owns HBO Max, it’s just paying itself: the data fee shows up on the HBO Max books as an expense and on the AT&T Mobility books as revenue. For AT&T as a whole, it zeroes out. Compare that to a competitor like Netflix, which could theoretically pay AT&T for sponsored data, but it would be a pure cost. “The network is the plumbing, and the content is the water. And you’re seeing water and the plumbing kind of coming together,” said Goncalves.