Hbo Max prepares for landing in Italy: alliances, local productions and the post-Sky challenge

Hbo Max leaves for Italy. And with an awareness that is immediately apparent: to conquer a market saturated with subscriptions, alliances will be needed, starting, as reported in Il Sole 24 Ore on newsstands today, 4 December 2025, with Timvision, the first possible partner for the new Warner Bros Discovery streamer. To that should then be added others, which will be unveiled at the 'big launch party' in Rome in mid-January 2026. And all this while on 31 December the long marriage with Sky will end in the Peninsula, opening a new game of interlocking platforms and rights.

Casey Bloys, chairman & ceo of Hbo and Hbo Max, sums up the strategy: 'I would say that the markets we will enter in 2026, Italy, Germany and the UK, are three of the most important in the world. In any market you enter, the ideal situation is to have local originals. They are very, very important. I think it would be difficult to be successful in all territories without local programming'. Italy becomes a testing ground.

On the table is a package of series to speak immediately to the Italian public. From the Enzo Tortora court case recounted in 'Portobello' to the Melania Rea feminicide, up to the docuseries on Gina Lollobrigida and Saman Abbas: a red thread of crime and family conflicts that Hbo declines in its own way, with true crime as the guiding genre but only when "it is done very well", as Bloys repeats.

Alongside the local stories will come the battleship of the Hbo catalogue: 'We expect "Harry Potter" to do very well, and also "Games of Thrones" and "House of the Dragon", "Last of Us", "It: Welcome to Derry", but I don't think you can have a streamer relying only on US products. The ideal situation is also to have several local originals. That is what we are trying to do in Italy and Germany. The message to authors is clear: 'What I say to all programmers of local originals is: don't worry about building 'trips'. I think that's a bad way to develop. I think you should develop the best show for your territory, because the really good shows travel".

The decision to push on Italian productions comes as the relationship with the former partner changes skin. As of 2026, Sky will no longer have the new Hbo series exclusively and, year after year, will also lose the box sets of top titles, from White Lotus to The Last of Us via House of the Dragon. In London, where Warner Bros. Discovery presented the 2026 line-up, the chance encounter in the street of the group of Italian journalists who had just come out of the theatre in Soho, London, where the Hbo Max project and products were presented, with Nils Hartmann, head of Sky Studios Italia, ideally restores the tension of a season of goodbyes and reshuffles.