On May 23, mega-media company Warner Bros. Discovery has pulled the trigger on its big streaming app upgrade — well, downgrade, really. Yesterday saw the launch of the new “Max” app and service, where the company has brought together all of its streaming content in one place. Concretely, this means adding Discovery content to HBO Max.
For Apple TV, the experience is a huge step backwards. There’s a new app, technical issues, missing features, and lower prices – and there’s no good reason for it all. It’s a comedy of errors that smacks of management interference against the best advice of real product designers who know what people actually want.
Look for the Max app
Launch the HBO Max app and you’re greeted with a big message: “Something went wrong.” The company has been sending out easy-to-ignore emails mentioning that Max is coming for a while now, but you can forgive most Apple device users for assuming that the now-defunct HBO Max app would just update to Max. No. It’s a new app that you need to download, and the error message on the HBO Max app doesn’t tell you.
I don’t know who decided to call it “Max”, when the “Max” (aka Cinemax) part of the content wasn’t very popular and the HBO brand was synonymous with must-have prestige television.
From a corporate suit perspective, this makes sense. HBO wasn’t exactly known for its kids’ programming or the kind of low-effort, leave-behind, unscripted reality TV that dominates Discovery. We wouldn’t want people to think they missed this!
Social media was obviously overflowing with “God, this is stupid” comments, but the best take has to come from rival NBC Universal streaming platform Peacock on Twitter.
There are of course other problems. The app is basic with overly simple navigation given the breadth of content. For some reason, someone who really should know better decided to consolidate writers, directors, and producers into one “Creators” section, which immediately angered the Writer’s Guild of America and the Director’s Guild without no benefit.
A bad custom player, again?
Max’s video playback is a custom work instead of the native tvOS player, and it’s as bad as you’d imagine. It’s almost (but not quite) as bad as the Peacock player was at launch.
You don’t get Siri’s remote jog wheel feature, you can’t use the wonderful Siri “what did he say?” feature, there is no picture-in-picture support, no system-wide accessibility features are supported (such as reducing flashing lights or loud sounds ), content frame rate matching, etc.
The funny thing is that the company really should know better. The HBO Max app got a big update two years ago that ditched the native player for a custom player and the outcry was so big they brought back the native tvOS player within a month.
Many users have noticed a lack of support for the Up Next queue in the TV app on Apple TV, but it seems to be a technical issue that doesn’t affect everyone. . I have Succession And barry in my Up Next queue and they still work fine, even though they had to redirect to the new Max app.
Don’t worry, at least it costs more!
The worst part is that the price has gone up. There is a $9.99 monthly tier with ads and a $15.99 ad-free tier that also lets you download 30 pieces of content. These are the same as the old HBO Max prices, although you can now only watch on two screens at once instead of three. But the ad-free tier previously got you 4K and HDR video and Dolby Atmos audio, and those are now locked behind a more expensive $19.99 Ultimate plan (which also gets you two additional simultaneous streams and a total of 100 downloads).
Anyone who already has an HBO Max ad-free subscription is grandfathered for six months, but after that you’ll have to pay an extra $4 per month for the same audio and video quality.
Obviously, someone at Warner Bros. Discovery wants Max to be the new Netflix – a video streaming service with a huge range of content you seemingly can’t live without and are willing to pay a fortune for. And if Netflix can get away with avoiding all tvOS standards, why can’t they? But Warner Bros. Discovery doesn’t have a first-mover advantage and the streaming landscape is more competitive than ever.
“Something went wrong”, indeed. This $6.99 per month Apple TV+ subscription is starting to get better every day.
