Time Warner had its fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday morning, and HBO, a subsidiary of the network, revealed some interesting information about its new standalone streaming service, HBO Now. The highly anticipated launch of HBO Now was expected to draw a huge following from cord-cutters. But Richard Plepler, the CEO of HBO, told investors and journalists that HBO Now had only attracted about 800,000 subscribers since the service launched in April.

Plepler said he was pleased with the growth, especially considering that HBO Now hasn’t yet been released on Playstation and Xbox platforms. He added that HBO Now also hasn’t yet released content from Jon Stewart, Bill Simmons, and the Vice Daily News Show, which he said was certain to drive subscriptions. Still, 800,000 subscribers could be seen as a slow start, especially considering that Plepler told investors in November 2014 that he was hoping to draw in four or five million new subscribers with HBO Now.

”We’re learning all the time… We see an enormous amount of subscribers ahead,” Plepler said on the call today, adding that, "HBO Now is an additive part of our growth strategy… We’re going to work in a multifaceted way to expand our sub[scriber] base.”

Together, HBO and Cinemax brought in 2.7 million new subscribers who purchased either a traditional bundle or HBO Now’s online-only package.

On the call, one investor asked about HBO Now’s price point—at $14.99 a month, it’s $5 more expensive than a monthly Netflix subscription. Plepler said that for the time being, HBO has no plans to lower that subscription cost, but it would continue to assess the market.

HBO Now was a contentious project getting off the ground because it gave cord-cutters a way to further divorce themselves from traditional pay-TV packages without having to lose HBO’s very popular content. Content distributors that suddenly saw themselves getting cut out of the loop were reluctant to back such a service. But Plepler said in October that he didn’t understand why broadband providers like Comcast, Charter, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T (which owns DirecTV) wouldn’t jump at the chance to distribute HBO Now. “If you’re Brian [Roberts, CEO of Comcast] and you have 6 million broadband subs, why would you not bundle HBO and share that revenue with us? Why would you give up that real estate and not be paid for it? I don’t understand it,” Plepler said at the time.

Plepler argued today that distributors are coming around, realizing that they need to offer more on-demand content, especially if they want to attract younger audiences. “I reject the notion that our major distributors out-of-hand don’t want to bundle HBO Now,” Plepler said, adding that as HBO’s contracts with its distributors come up for renewal, it can renegotiate in a way that’s beneficial for HBO Now.

According to leaked details of an early contract with DirecTV in December 2014, the TV provider wanted to be able to scale back its marketing of HBO if HBO signed up more than 450,000 subscribers nationally or more than 300,000 subscribers in any given market. It’s unclear if such a contract ever went into effect.

But Plepler seems to think that distributors are seeing the light. “Nobody’s doing us any favors by selling HBO; they’re growing their business by using our brand,” the CEO said.