HBO Max is finally coming to the UK and Ireland – and it’s arriving with the kind of swagger you’d expect from the home of Game of Thrones, Succession and House of the Dragon. On Thursday, 26 March 2026, Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming platform will switch on in both markets, folding together HBO shows, Warner Bros. films, DC titles, Max Originals and, crucially for sports fans, TNT Sports under one roof.

For viewers, this isn’t just “another streamer joins the UK pile”; it’s a fairly major reshuffle of who has what, where you watch it, and how much you pay. Shows that have lived on Sky and NOW for years will gain a new home, Discovery+ will lose TNT Sports to HBO Max, and the pricing undercuts some of the biggest incumbents in the market.

At the heart of the launch is a simple promise: if it’s a big HBO series, a Warner Bros. tentpole, a DC universe spin‑off or TNT Sports’ live football and rugby, HBO Max wants to be the single place you think of first in the UK and Ireland.

The content slate at launch is designed to make that pitch very obvious. Flagship Max Original The Pitt, which cleaned up at the Emmys, Golden Globes and Critics’ Choice Awards in 2025, will finally be available to stream in the UK and Ireland from day one, with the whole first season ready to binge and season two episodes dropping weekly. It’s exactly the sort of buzzy, premium drama that has been oddly hard to access legally in these markets until now, and Warner Bros. Discovery clearly wants it to feel like “the show you sign up for” in March.

The Pitt is just the start. 2026 is being billed internally as one of HBO’s strongest slates in years, and the UK and Ireland launch is timed to ride that wave. Within weeks of HBO Max arriving, subscribers will be able to rewatch every episode of Euphoria before its much‑anticipated third season lands in April, exclusively on the new service in these territories. House of the Dragon returns with new episodes in 2026 as well, keeping the Game of Thrones universe firmly in the spotlight.

Then there are the new toys. Lanterns, a DC Studios series based on Green Lantern, is scheduled to debut in summer 2026 and will stream on HBO Max in the UK and Ireland, lining up with Warner’s broader push to rebuild DC’s screen universe. A long‑gestating Harry Potter TV series, which aims to retell the books in a more expansive form, is also promised as a marquee exclusive for the platform. Alongside that, early months will bring fresh HBO originals like DTF St. Louis, Rooster and the third and final season of The Comeback, giving the service a steady drumbeat of new episodes instead of a single launch‑week spike.

Crucially, HBO Max isn’t arriving as an empty shell that slowly fills up. Decades of HBO and Warner Bros. library are baked in from day one. That means all of Succession, Friends, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones and a long list of other staples will move under the HBO Max banner in the UK and Ireland, rather than being scattered across different services as they are today. For casual viewers, the practical translation is simple: almost every “prestige TV” recommendation you’ve been given over the last ten years is likely to sit in a single app.

On the film side, Warner Bros. is using HBO Max as a kind of digital front garden for its recent and legacy hits. The UK and Ireland catalogue will feature recent Oscar‑nominated box‑office draws such as One Battle After Another and Sinners, as well as superhero reboot Superman and the family‑friendly A Minecraft Movie. Dune: Part One is part of the line‑up, and both the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings film franchises will be available in full, positioning HBO Max as a go‑to home for big‑screen fantasy marathons.

Sports is where HBO Max’s UK ambition becomes much clearer. In the UK, the service will take over as the streaming home of TNT Sports, which is currently bundled into Discovery+. From 26 March, TNT Sports’ live rights portfolio – including Premier League matches, the Emirates FA Cup, Adobe Women’s FA Cup, UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League and UEFA Conference League football – will stream inside HBO Max instead. That line‑up is rounded out by Gallagher Premiership Rugby, Premiership Women’s Rugby, UFC, MotoGP, all four tennis Grand Slams, a heavy slate of cycling, including Grand Tours, the World Snooker Tour, winter sports and coverage of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games.

For existing TNT Sports subscribers in the UK, the message is “same price, different app”. The TNT Sports plan will be available at £30.99 per month, matching the current Discovery+ pricing, and customers will be able to log into HBO Max with their existing Discovery+ credentials when the switch happens. Discovery+ itself doesn’t vanish, but it does lose TNT Sports in the UK as those rights migrate across. For fans, the practical step is straightforward but important: download the HBO Max app ahead of time and be ready to sign in there if you want Champions League nights to continue uninterrupted.

If all this sounds like a lot of content, the pricing is where Warner Bros. Discovery is clearly trying to make a statement in a very crowded streaming market. In both the UK and Ireland, HBO Max will launch with four entertainment tiers, starting with a Basic with Ads plan at £4.99 per month. That entry‑level option lets you stream in Full HD on two devices simultaneously, but it excludes the movies that debut on HBO Max after their cinema window, meaning film obsessives may want to look higher up the ladder.

Standard with Ads, at £5.99 per month, keeps the Full HD two‑stream setup but adds access to those post‑theatrical movies and allows up to 30 downloads for offline viewing. Standard, priced at £9.99 per month, takes the same catalogue, strips out ads and keeps the 30‑download limit. At the top end, the £14.99 Premium tier offers up to four simultaneous streams in 4K Ultra HD with Dolby Atmos (where supported) and raises the download ceiling to 100 titles, aimed squarely at bigger households and home‑cinema setups.

Sports is effectively its own tier. The TNT Sports Plan, at £30.99 per month, brings TNT Sports 1–4, TNT Sports Ultimate, live event feeds and original sports documentaries, and can be taken either on its own in the UK or bolted onto select HBO Max entertainment plans. Two of your available HBO Max streams can be used for TNT Sports, giving sports fans a way to share the account at home without completely blowing up concurrency limits.

The obvious question is how this stacks up next to Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video and the rest – because in 2026, consumers are counting every subscription. Netflix’s ad‑supported tier in the UK is currently £5.99 a month, with Standard at £12.99 and Premium at £18.99, so HBO Max undercuts Netflix at the bottom and middle tiers while charging slightly less than Netflix for its own top‑end 4K option. Disney+ now offers multiple plans in the UK, with ad‑supported and ad‑free tiers that range roughly between £5.99 and £14.99 per month, so HBO Max is landing right in that mix rather than trying to be the cheapest on the market. Prime Video has moved to a split model with a cheaper ad‑supported tier and a more expensive ad‑free tier, while Apple TV sits at a flat £9.99 in the UK, putting HBO Max Standard up against them in both price and positioning.

Where HBO Max may quietly have an advantage is bundling. In the UK, Sky will be a major launch partner: HBO Max’s Basic with Ads tier will be included for Sky Stream and Sky Glass customers with Sky Ultimate TV, and Sky Q households will also see integration as part of their existing packages. NOW Entertainment subscribers will get HBO Max Basic with Ads folded into their membership from 26 March, with a new NOW Entertainment & HBO Max bundle replacing the old setup. For many Sky and NOW customers, HBO Max will therefore just appear as an extra tile and catalogue rather than an entirely new bill to justify.

Amazon’s Prime Video is also jumping on board as a launch partner in the UK and Ireland, offering HBO Max as an add‑on channel within the Prime Video interface. That means users already used to managing subscriptions through Amazon’s Channels system can tack HBO Max onto their existing Prime account instead of setting up yet another standalone login and billing relationship. TNT Sports via Prime Video will remain available as a standalone sports subscription, but crucially, in the UK, the streaming of TNT Sports itself is moving to HBO Max as the underlying app, even when purchased via partners.

From a usability perspective, Warner Bros. Discovery is at pains to say HBO Max won’t be a bare‑bones app in these markets. The service will be available on a full spread of devices at launch – smart TVs, set‑top boxes, streaming sticks, mobiles, tablets and games consoles – with support for Android and iOS, Samsung and LG TVs, Fire TV, Roku, PlayStation, Xbox, Virgin TV, EE/BT TV and more. Subscribers can create up to five personalised profiles, get recommendations tuned to each profile’s viewing habits and use standard features like Continue Watching and offline downloads (depending on plan). Parents can set up kids’ profiles with age‑appropriate content and parental controls, which is increasingly table stakes in the streaming world but still essential if you’re putting Succession and Peppa Pig‑adjacent content in the same app.

Pre‑registration for HBO Max will open on the App Store and Google Play on 12 March, giving early adopters a couple of weeks to get set up before the March 26 switch‑on. Behind the scenes, this launch is also symbolically important for Warner Bros. Discovery. The UK and Ireland rollout completes HBO Max’s European tour, after previous waves across the continent, as WBD pushes towards a target of 150 million streaming subscribers worldwide by the end of 2026. The company reported 128 million streaming subscribers as of the third quarter of 2025, so adding two of Europe’s most valuable English‑language markets with a combined entertainment‑and‑sport package is a logical next step.

Executives are, unsurprisingly, talking it up. JB Perrette, CEO and President of Global Streaming and Games at Warner Bros. Discovery, describes the move as “bringing it all together” for UK and Irish audiences after decades of seeing HBO and Warner Bros. brands scattered across different local partners. Andrew Georgiou, who heads Warner Bros. Discovery in the UK & Ireland and oversees its European sports arm, frames HBO Max as a “single destination” that combines beloved series and films with premium sport in what he insists is a “strong value proposition”. Read between the lines and the strategy is clear: if you can get households to see HBO Max as both their main drama boxset service and their go‑to sports subscription, churn becomes much harder.

For viewers, though, it boils down to a simpler set of questions. Do you want the HBO back catalogue in one place instead of hopping between Sky, NOW and other services? Are you already paying for TNT Sports on Discovery+ and happy to follow it to a new home at the same price? And in a world where every service now has multiple ad and ad‑free tiers, does a £4.99 entry point for HBO‑grade TV and films – plus the option to scale up to 4K and live sport – fit into your monthly mix better than yet another price hike from an incumbent?

Come 26 March, UK and Irish audiences will get the chance to answer those questions for themselves, remote in hand, app store open, and yet another shiny new tile appearing on their TV screens.