When HBO Max launched its ad-supported plan in 2021, it promised no more than four minutes of ads per hour. Now, it’s quietly backtracked.
A support page for Max’s Basic with Ads plan says to expect six minutes of ads per hour, a 50 percent jump. According to the Wayback Machine, that same page listed four minutes of ads per hour as recently as February 2025.
And despite its original promise not to show ads during HBO programming, Max has been breaking up HBO shows with commercials as well. An episode of The Last of Us, for instance, had three ad breaks, plus a batch of ads before the video started. (The service is changing its name back to HBO Max next month.)
Max isn’t alone in stuffing more ads into its videos. Last week, AdWeek reported that Amazon had roughly doubled the length of commercial breaks on Prime Video, and third-party data has shown rising ad loads on Disney+, Hulu, Discovery+, Peacock, and Netflix.
But none have broken their promises as explicitly as Max, which once touted “a commitment to the lowest commercial ad load in the streaming industry.” Now it has one of the highest among its subscription-based peers.
A representative for Warner Bros. Discovery did not respond on the record to questions.
The Max support page on February 16 (via archive.org), showing four minutes of ads per hour.
Jared Newman / Foundry
Jared Newman / Foundry
A string of broken promises
Lots of ad-supported streamers start off preaching a “less is more” philosophy toward commercials.
Going back to 2008, Hulu’s then-CEO Jason Kilar told the New York Times that showing fewer commercials would make them more memorable, benefiting viewers and advertisers alike. At the time, the streamer only showed a single ad per commercial break. “The notion that less is more is absolutely playing out on Hulu,” Kilar said at the time.
Since then, streamers have discovered that more is in fact more. By 2010, Hulu was packing more ads into its commercial breaks and was under pressure from advertisers to stretch them out further. As of 2023, Hulu was showing more than seven minutes of ads per hour, more than any other major service according to MediaRadar data provided to Insider.
Hulu’s approach has since become a blueprint for other streamers to follow.
Disney, for instance, promised its own light touch when it launched an ad-supported Disney+ plan in 2022, with the Wall Street Journal reporting an average of four minutes per hour. Less than a year later, Disney+ had already pushed past that number to 5.3 minutes per hour according to MediaRadar.
As for Amazon, it brought ads to Prime Video in 2023 with a stated goal of having “meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers.” The company told advertisers that it would show between two and 3.5 minutes of ads per hour, the Wall Street Journal reported. According to AdWeek, it’s now showing between four and six minutes of ads per hour instead.
In fairness, programmers pack much longer commercial breaks into traditional TV channels, with ad breaks of 15 to 18 minutes per hour according to Wurl. (Infamously, they’ve even sped up syndicated shows like Friends and Seinfeld to make room for more ads.) Free, ad-supported services also have more ads per hour—around nine minutes, per Wurl—than subscription-based ones.
But as the traditional TV audience dwindles, you can expect streamers to compensate by squeezing in longer commercial breaks. Much like the cost of each streaming service, the number of ads you see is only going up.
Jared Newman / Foundry
What you can do about it
There are no easy workarounds to the increasing number of ads on streaming services, but home theater PC users can take advantage of extensions like MultiSkipper to fast forward through them. A service called PlayOn can also record shows from streaming services, so you can watch the recordings and skip the commercials, though this has its own ongoing costs and hardware requirements.
Otherwise, viewers should consider short-term, ad-free subscriptions as an alternative to year-round, ad-supported ones. Paying for a few months of ad-free HBO Max every year might make more sense than keeping a Basic with Ads plan on-hand at all times, especially as commercial breaks lengthen.
And the next time a streaming service boldly proclaims a “less is more” approach to advertising, don’t believe it. This story always ends the same way.
Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more streaming TV advice.
