Operator Vodafone Spain is offering one year of free access to the HBO España video-on-demand service to new customers who subscribe to its Superyuser and Megayuser prepaid plans between 20 November and 27 November. The latest promotion in the operator’s “Black Friday” campaign allows new customers to activate the HBO España service for 12 months by 31 January 2018, as long as they remain subscribed to the chosen tariff.

HBO España was launched as a stand-alone VoD platform in May 2016 and reached 414,000 Spanish households at the end of June 2017.

Tarifica’s Take

Prepaid plans are a good way for operators to gain customers who, mainly for budgetary reasons, want the flexibility and short-term, non-binding nature of such offers. The down side, from an operator’s point of view, is the relative impermanence of prepaid customers. Converting such customers to long-term subscribers has always been a priority with operators, and the current HBO promotion from Vodafone Spain is intended as a means of getting prepaid customers to stay on longer. And if they do, there is more chance that eventually they could be converted to postpaid.

One year’s worth of cost-free access to HBO España is quite a generous offer, in our view. To keep it, though, new subscribers need to remain in their prepaid plans. So there is a significant incentive here for them to keep subscribing for at least a year. That is ample time for them to form a relationship with the operator that they may well wish to continue and even deepen in the future.