Starz Bundles Up with Max & AMC+ Hoping for Safety in Numbers

It hasn't even been a whole month since the start of 2025, and already, there are streaming services that are desperately trying not to be the next to collapse in the face of a changing entertainment landscape. January kicked off with two of the most vulnerable companies still standing — AMC Networks and Starz — announcing a new deal where Vizio TV subscribers who sign up for AMC+ will get Starz as a bonus, and those who sign up for Starz can have AMC+. (In business school, this is known as "tying two rocks together and hoping they'll float." I'm not kidding.)

Now Starz has announced another deal: subscribing to Max brings Starz along for the ride, and vice versa. This is a bigger deal than the AMC+ one, which was limited to those who own Vizio TVs and are, therefore, semi-locked into Vizio's default streaming service that comes free with purchase. The Max-Starz bundle is for those who subscribe through Amazon's Prime Video service, which has been sneakily trying to become cable's replacement by offering as many streaming services as possible as "add-ons" to the Prime service or via the Firestick.

Starz was one of the earliest to jump on the "add-on" offer, resulting in many subscribers accessing and paying for Starz via Prime and/or Firestick. (it's why Amazon's first move when it got MGM+ was to bundle it with Starz.) Max, meanwhile, is one of the biggest streamers to agree to let Prime give it the add-on treatment, and the percentage of those who access it that way is big enough that when Warner Bros. tried to end the program, they had to backpedal.