Pundit
Jason Kilar
2 receipts • Tracked since Sep 2026
Jason Kilar is the former CEO of WarnerMedia, where he launched HBO Max. He was the founding CEO of Hulu and a longtime senior executive at Amazon.
Affiliations
No firm affiliations on record.
— Filed —
2 receipts
2021
2 predictions- Mar 4, 2021Called it.“Only a handful of major streaming services "can ultimately get to scale, defined by hundreds of millions of paying subscribers around the world" - "Less than six."”
Five years on, the count is not just under six - it is basically one. Netflix passed 325 million paying members in Q1 2026; Disney+ stopped disclosing at 132 million (fiscal Q4 2025); Amazon's 315 million figure is Prime Video ad-tier viewers, not paying subscribers. The shakeout Kilar called played out through mergers, bundles and retreats.
- Mar 4, 2021Called it.“HBO Max is "two years ahead" of WarnerMedia's goal of 75 million - 90 million subscribers worldwide by 2025.”
The corporate vehicle changed (WarnerMedia became Warner Bros. Discovery in 2022, and Kilar exited in the merger), but the trajectory he called held: WBD reported 97.7 million global streaming subscribers at the end of 2023 - above the 90 million ceiling, two years before the 2025 deadline, exactly the lead time Kilar claimed. Caveat: the post-merger figure combines Max and discovery+.