AT&T’s newest subscriber figures make it appear to be HBO and its sister service HBO Max are doing fairly effectively — nice, even! In a regulatory filing this week, AT&T revealed that it beat its projected year-end aim with 73.8 million whole subscribers between HBO and HBO Max (even after its breakup with Amazon). Not too dangerous, proper?

But that win comes after a yr of extremely anticipated film debuts meant to balloon subscriber numbers, and it’s nonetheless tens of tens of millions of subscribers behind rivals like Disney Plus and Netflix. The numbers additionally include some fairly huge caveats. In different phrases, maintain the applause.

For one, AT&T’s figures (earlier reported by Variety) conflate two separate providers — HBO, its cable enterprise, and HBO Max, its streaming service — and so they don’t distinguish what number of subscribers every service has individually. WarnerMedia spokesperson Jaclyn Mandelbaum advised The Verge that extra data “will be broken out in AT&T’s earnings in a couple weeks” however declined to specify figures for every service.

AT&T’s progress additionally seems much less spectacular given the high-profile content material slate it served during the last yr, together with titles like Dune, The Matrix Resurrections, and the third season of Succession. On prime of that, HBO Max added a lower-priced tier and launched internationally partway via the yr — each of which ought to have helped increase its subscribers considerably.

Disney Plus added greater than twice as many subscribers over an identical time interval. Disney’s streaming service, which launched roughly six months earlier than HBO Max, reported 118.1 million paid subscribers as of October 2021, up from 73.7 million a couple of yr earlier. HBO’s 73.8 million report, however, is barely up from 61 million subscribers globally on the finish of 2020.

Streaming information is nearly inconceivable to sort out on a one-for-one comparability degree for myriad causes, not the least of which being that everybody is taking part in by totally different guidelines. That’s to say nothing of how piracy, account-sharing, and options like auto-play can considerably skew a very correct image of subscriber and title success.

Last yr ought to’ve been HBO Max’s yr to win. It’s going to have to search out new methods to develop with out the assistance of a extremely anticipated day-and-date slate.