HBO Max is now on Roku. Thanks, Wonder Woman!

The monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything that happens in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, from TV to Twitter.

Earlier this week, I typed the following in a new media snitch moment:

Look, not to look petty (It looks petty), but I just wanna watch friends. And The prince of Bel-Air. Hell, maybe even Zack Snyder’s cut Justice League, if it ever comes out. But now I can’t. Why? Because both of my TVs use Roku streaming devices, and, as has been the case since launch, HBO Max—The location of this lineup – is not available on Roku. It’s just… not there. One day, HBO Go just pulled Keyser Söze-d out of my life and nothing came along to replace it. My HBO streaming option was gone and it took Gender and city marathons with. Thank you damn I own Dead wood on DVD.

As often happens in journalism, however, this story ceased to be a story before I could break the Publish button. Indeed, on Wednesday, Roku and WarnerMedia announced that they would finally come to an agreement to host HBO Max on Roku devices.

The move comes nearly six months after the streaming service launch. It may not seem like very long in the long arc of the story, but during a pandemic that has left people stuck in their homes looking for new content to stream, it’s an eternity. It also comes after WarnerMedia made deals to put HBO Max on almost every other device, including the Playstation 5. Even Amazon and WarnerMedia, which hadn’t struck a deal for more than five months, finally struck a deal to put the streaming service on Fire TV devices in November. And while, with all these devices already lined up, it might seem like the absence of Roku isn’t a big deal, remember that Roku dominates. nearly half of the connected television market.

But now we all have HBO Max. Hooray! You probably have to thank Wonder Woman for this. Earlier this year, Warner Bros. ad he would release Wonder Woman 1984 on the streaming service on December 25, and while the niceties of the deal were not disclosed, indicated reports that WarnerMedia wanted to secure the Roku piece of the HBO Max puzzle before that date. It also seems possible that the company wanted to close the deal before the start of 2021, during which Warner Bros. will release its entire lineup of films, including highly anticipated films like Dune and The matrix 4– on HBO Max the same day they hit theaters (a limited number).