John Oliver Slams HBO For Delaying YouTube Clips of His Show in Ploy to Gain Max Subscribers: ‘Massively Frustrating’

Screenshot via LastWeekTonight on YouTube

John Oliver sat for a conversation with The New York Times podcast The Interview and aired his frustrations with the network that produces his show.

The wide-ranging interview published Saturday covered Oliver’s frustration with a lot of things, but one subject touched on was the fact that HBO would not allow clips from Last Week Tonight on YouTube until the Thursday after its Sunday night air date. The New York Times‘ Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked Oliver if he thought this was an attempt by HBO to get more people to sign up for the Max streaming service. He said that he “assume[d]” that was true and told Garcia-Navarro that he found the move “massively frustrating to me. I was not happy with it at all.”

Garcia-Navarro: Are you worried about the method of distribution? I mean, we know that cable TV is changing a lot. YouTube is exponentially growing, and it’s a place where a lot of different types of people come to get their content.

Oliver: What I love about having the show on YouTube is that we can reach beyond HBO subscribers. That feels really important to me. I really, really appreciate the fact that they do that. I would rather they did it straight after the show the way we’ve always done it, but I’m very grateful that they are willing to still do it at all.

Deadline reported the change in YouTube availability back in February when the eleventh season of Last Week Tonight premiered. HBO wrote in a statement to Deadline that this was an attempt to get viewers to watch the “entire show” on Max instead of individual segments:

When Last Week Tonight with John Oliver premiered on HBO, the convenience of watching on Max did not exist so YouTube allowed flexible viewing for the main story as well as promotional exposure. We are now delaying that availability and hope those fans choose to watch the entire show on Max.

Oliver, who regularly shared a YouTube link to the main story on his own  account, posted on Twitter/X at the time that he’d hoped they would reconsider.