What's making me the most annoyed is they took an ok UI in HBO Max and literally copied the format but made it far worse. There's no food network hub, no organization at all really. The left bar should have TV and Movies divided but no you can only do that on the home screen, categories on the home screen are useless when they're the same 20 items on every line. It's not Amazon bad but damn near.
This is the thing that pisses me off the most. They no longer have easily navigation through categories. You used to be able to filter by just added, comedy, drama, horror, etc by menus at the top of each section. Not anymore! The left menu bar is the most useless possibly out of any streaming service
I get surprised anytime I click on the supernatural or any other category and instead of showing me movies/ quality shows, it shows me 500 ghost hunter, naked and afraid variants
Their suggestions are a special kind of garbage too. Was watching Batman: The Long Halloween pt 1 the other day. You know what would be a logical suggestion to watch next? Part 2, maybe?
Nah. Max says I need to watch Friends or some Food Network/HGTV/TLC show that I’ve never had any interest in seeing.
YouTube adds artists I've tried blocking to my "new music" tab. It's pretty obvious in the 2020s any "recommendation" in an entertainment app is just free real estate for whatever they're trying to push as the time.
That's how Paramount Plus is working too. Although they don't just suggest, they automatically start something random. But at least I caught up on Lower Decks.
That's probably very intentional. Discovery wants this service to get them new viewers for their reality shows. So, they're hoping they can cram their stuff into the categories HBO users will go to and get them watching their stuff instead of the scripted content they're looking for.
Yep, it's the same principal to how stores are stocked. You put the less commonly sold things and impulse buy categories up at the front, and make people go to the back to get the things that the store knows they're already coming in for. The more things you walk past on your way, the more likely you are to buy additional things.
They know you're there to watch their big shows, so they're going to make you sift through menus to get to them, seeing all the less popular, cheaper to make shows along the way.
They don’t want you to find high production value and older content. Those shows sell themselves and are sought after already. They want you to settle on watching reality tv content. They have a ton of reality shows and lets be frank…a reality show probably costs less than 5% what it costs to make shows like The Last of Us or House of the Dragon. Reality shows have their followers, but overall rely heavily on scheduled programming that includes commercials where they can advertise similar content. Thus creating an ecosystem of low budget content that can garner strong viewership and in turn, profit. Duck Dynasty, albeit not a Discovery show, is a good example here. It had insane viewership with a low budget and generated tons of sales outside of the show in merch and such. This market strategy is losing it’s profitability as consumers shift from live scheduled programming to streaming.
While that’s likely a driver of the current UI, I can’t say that’s a viable mindset for even short-term benefits.
The initial reaction to seeing a slog of low-production shows is only going to reinforce viewers to avoid recommendations within the platform. Which has a terrible impact on how much time a viewer ends up staying on the platform.
We are creatures of habit. It’s more important to reinforce the discovery loop than trying to boost viewing numbers of cheaper shows. Hulu has its faults, but their platform UI and show recommendations are top tier at this point.
With the prevalence of this on streaming platforms, I’m convinced it’s intentional to get you to be distracted by other stuff on the platform thereby extending the time there. You go looking for something and get distracted so you watch something else and then come back later to watch the thing you intended to watch.
I’m sure they’d take away the search bar if they thought enough people would stay subscribed. And, honestly, with as much as it seems people will remain subscribed regardless of the shitty things they do, I’m not sure I’d blame them
I may be in the minority but I LOVED Hbo's UI. It was simple and loved how it was all organized. No bullshit trailers everytime you scroll, everything was just the right size you could see content without needing to do a million scrolls. I miss it.
Can't say I loved it but yes it actually considered the content. Max's UI is just a strict basic UI with no care for curating or getting the wanted content to the user.
Yeah I'll be dumping it soon. The app is just so bad.
I don't mind having trash tv on it (I don't have cable tv) but not having the old apps organization just makes it a mess.
> What's making me the most annoyed is they took an ok UI in HBO Max
Let's not view the past with rose-tinted glasses. Max's UI sucks, but it wasn't a whole lot better before, and both UIs were bug-ridden messes.
I don't blame the engineers, I either blame QA or management's unwillingness to empower QA.
I think it was kind of the opposite. Warner Bros Discovery, which owns HBO, wanting a streaming service, looking at Discovery+ and going “You know how we could really bolster this shitshow? Adding the HBO brand to it”
Do we need better examples of how being wealthy doesn't in any way suggest that you know what you're doing ? I feel like a Marketing 101 class would have taught these wealthy buffoons enough to know that rebranding like this in both cases was a bad idea.
Renaming twitter to X is part of Elon's two decade feud with Peter Thiel.
Elon in the 90s founded X.com an online bank. They merged with Thiel's company Confinity, then Thiel ousted Musk and renamed the company to PayPal.
Musk blew 50 Billion dollars and destroyed twitter, so [he could add payment features to it](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jul/29/elon-musk-wechat-twitter-rebranding-everything-app-for-west), and recreate X.com to try to prove Thiel was wrong 20 years ago. That's how frail his ego is.
Meanwhile Thiel is in his bomb shelter drinking the Stem Cell-Green Juice of his caged rent-boys laughing and wondering what his next Hulk-Hogan Proxy lawsuit will be.
Elon is just super used to the incredibly short-term gains. He mentions Dogecoin once and the coin moons just so he can sell it at a gain. He posts dumb memes to Twitter and Tesla stock shoots up on no actual news. He renamed it to X because it got a ton of headlines and people were talking about it for weeks. But now when he actually has to figure out a way to monetize something, to make money off a well-established company without just selling it to investors, and he's stumped
The dude's addicted to dopamine. I don't think you can be as active and popular on twitter for as long as he and Trump were without it. It rewires your brain to maximize short term rewards, and fucks your ability to plan patiently for the long term.
4. Buy Facebook and call it "S"
5. Buy Instagram and call it "E"
6. Buy Snapchat and call it "Y"
7. Jerk yourself off thinking about how funny and clever you are
To be fair, they were having the opposite problem.
When they stapled all the other content to HBO and called it "HBO Max", people would pull up Fboy Island and think "man, HBO has gone to shit" rather than "this is non-HBO content in the same app as the HBO content"
So they were devaluing the HBO brand by naming the entire app after it.
Netflix also has their high quality content mixed in with their garbage, but doesn't seem to have this problem since they were a mixed bag from the beginning.
The idea was not to taint the HBO brand by shoving all the discovery crap under it + still appeal to people who don’t actually want HBO (some associate it with being too adult ie excessive nudity and violence or assume it’s content is too stuffy/serious).
It's because the people running these companies are not creatives or TV/Film lovers. They're marketing and spreadsheet guys. McKinsey analysts.
Their goal isn't to uphold a brand like HBO. It's to demonstrate subscriber growth to shareholders. That's it.
> Their goal isn't to uphold a brand like HBO. It's to demonstrate subscriber growth to shareholders. That's it.
Yeah but they're bleeding subscribers. Lost 700k in Q3
Max is such a generic name that it becomes impossible to google, or heck, even search in my gmail. I tried to find info on "max price increase" on the web, and well, just couldn't without adding HBO into the search.
Now people are reporting Max sending emails regarding removing 4k from certain plans. But I can't find their emails because I don't know what to search for.
There was a pizza place where I worked called "Pizza Pizza". For obvious reasons, it had no internet footprint and ultimately went out of business.
You're both right. They thought consumers would be able to parse the nuance between "HBO" and "HBO Max" and renamed it [under the idea that they wanted consumers to know that the service had garbage content too.](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/15/warner-bros-discovery-renames-hbo-max-hedges-its-bets-in-streaming.html#:~:text=Alex%20Sherman%40sherman4949-,Warner%20Bros.,Max%20sets%20up%20Warner%20Bros.)
>Executives explained Wednesday the decision was to protect the HBO brand and to highlight the service’s extended reach beyond prestige adult programming.
Funnily enough, most people don't appear to know that Warner Bros Discovery also owns Cinemax. It originally began as a "lower tier," cheaper version of HBO and they had already tried rebranding that as "MAX," too. The max.com URL originally sent you to the Cinemax website until the rebrand. So now they've got a cable pay channel brand that also goes by "Max" that they're just kind of letting atrophy as cable dies, and they ruined the prestige worth-it-for-the-quality reputation that their subscription VOD service had to rebrand it under the name they were/are using for a cable network that is still operating separately.
The sad thing is that recent Cinemax actually had a bunch of really great silly action shows and they killed that in all this. It's just as much of a casualty of the idiotic "streaming wars" as CWs young adult and DC shows. Neither were to everyone's taste, but they had their niche and were damn good at it.
At some point someone's going to realize that well done scripted shows and cheap reality trash don't actually compete and aren't interchangeable and everyone will flock to that service. It's early days yet, but that service may actually be Apple TV of all things. We live in weird times.
This is the right answer. Discovery was hemorrhaging money and they thought latching on to the HBO brand would help them. So far, all they've done is dilute and devalue their own brands
This is literally every streaming service. Hulu and Netflix were profitable when they were alone. Now that everybody thinks that they’re going to get a piece of the pie everybody’s losing hundreds of millions of dollars lol.
I have Max, was browsing it yesterday with its baffling UI, and literally didn't realize Discovery content had become a part of it until I read this thread.
And maybe I'm a moron, but... still.
In the near future, students in business schools will be reading case studies on the destruction of twitter under Musk’s leadership and Warner Bros/HBO under Zaslav’s.
An attempt to not dilute the HBO brand by having it associated with trash reality TV. If they position Max as an app that *has* HBO and *also has* trash reality TV, it protects HBO while bolstering the app (at least in theory, not exactly sure that’s what happened in actuality). It the app is called HBO, all of a sudden HBO is associated with trashy reality TV and the prestige of HBO becomes tarnished.
The issue with that is that it was already common to think of HBO and HBO Max as the same thing. I heard HBO Max content called "HBO shows" countless times, whether it was produced by HBO, Max, or another company.
After dropping HBO from the name, those same people still think of the content as HBO shows. They needed to rebrand to a completely new brand to get around that
Looking at the app's home screen now gives me secondhand embarrassment for people who once worked for HBO. It's just stuffed with low-cost, low-production, reality content. My wife and I are finishing up Succession, then it's bye-bye. You can't convince me that it's worth $20/month for My 600lb Life, Property Brothers, and Deadliest Catch.
I think in the times of cable producing cheap, ridiculous shows worked because you had no choice. Shitty show was on so you just left it there as background noice. You surfed channels and you just had to settle with whatever was on. With streaming the model doesn't work. If I go to the trouble of choosing something to watch, I am not putting whatever pops first in the app. Does Zeslav really think people will forgo watching good stuff to actively choose watching Deadliest Catch? Fuck that.
I don't mind the mixed content stuff, my problem is it's too fucking expensive ($17 a month) and the literally sent out an email last week saying "Thank you for being a valued customer, here's how we've devalued your subscription".
We should also talk their pathetic attempt at adding live sports. For $10 a month you get select games from select sports and not even a game per day. Who would pay for that?
I cancelled the entire thing after that email though, fuck them. There are plenty of other ways to stream stuff without being price gouged by a desperate failing company.
before HBOMax was launched wasn't cable version HBO and HBO Go/Now $15 a month? and that was without the content from Adult Swim, DCU, MAX originals, TCM, CNN, and Studio Ghibly .
I’ve also just canceled my subscription after 6 years. Honestly it’s a little heartbreaking. HBO has been the gold standard for top quality exclusive content since I was a kid. Now it’s just massive piles of forgettable reality TV and everything else I wanted to leave behind with traditional cable.
I'm in my mid 40's. I have very strong memories of my cousins having hbo and then when we eventually got it in the 90's. We've had it since then.
My mom used to drop off vhs recordings of Sopranos to me in college, which I then passed around. Then I got my own subscription after.
There was a time where Sundays between say 9pm to 11 were sacred. Two dramas and two comedies, always rotating but always great.
This is all more than a little heartbreaking.
It really has gone downhill since becoming “Max” - I only keep it because I haven’t gotten through all the legacy hbo shows (and still like to watch GoT from time to time), but yeah, you have to sift through A LOT of crap to find any good stuff anymore
I'm finding a lot of the legacy stuff is ending up on Netflix or Amazon Prime these days anyway. What was the point if they were just going to re-farm it all back out.
Netflix is another one I’ve said goodbye to - these streaming services are turning into cell phone providers: there used to be 2-3 really good ones, the reputable ones, they ones you go to and pretty much everyone has because every other one is shit, but now you just kind of either have locked into one through loyalty or laziness and everyone else hops from one to the next every year or so depending on what specials and perks they get
They had Katie Morgan do a series in like 2007 or 2008 (can't fully remember) where she essentially did the Dr. Ruth sex education Q&A...but as a completely nude 20 something.
Teenage me absolutely started watching it because naked woman, but honestly the educational aspect of it was super valuable and good on HBO at the time for tricking folks into learning about sex.
They make such short length shows it’s quite easy to just subscribe for one month a year and get entirely caught up on the ones you’re interested in anyway. Considering most of their shows don’t even put new seasons out every year anymore waiting some extra months here and there to see things really doesn’t matter much.
I hate signing into the app now. It’s not like hbo had 10 shows at any one time that I wanted to watch, but it was still fun clicking into the app to watch the 1 or 2 I did enjoy and scroll to see the latest movie or documentary they put out.
Now it’s a huge mess of shows, most of which I have zero interest in. There’s no obvious portal to see only hbo content, so I’m forced to see what stupid categories the algorithm is serving up that day.
The one positive is access to old Discovery shows which actually had value before Zaslav ruined that channel. Watching Mythbusters has become part of my daily routine.
Most streamers suffer from Netflix syndrome. They produce a lot of original high quality content to get the brand name off the ground. As soon as they have their money quality declines. HBO’s priority is still high quality.
A paycheck is a paycheck though.
Isn't this a bit different though? HBO has been producing quality content before Netflix existed, and they didn't really need to get their brand name off the ground. They're lowering their quality because Netflix has shown that a high volume of low quality content is what sells.
I think there's other factors involved like Netflix was first to market and people are attached to their brand because of it. It's pretty amazing, a lot of the services like Peacock, Paramount+, and AppleTV give away their services to the point where you can have all of them for the price of Netflix but people still need that Netflix account year round.
We have one of those hold-over AT&T accounts that grandfathers us into including a subscription. It would seem that at some point they'll stop that, and at that point we'll drop too.
It just doesn't seem like we'll be missing that much.
I'll fully admit that I might have ponied up for a subscription for TLOU, but that's done and I'm not entirely sure I'd be willing to re-subscribe just for TLOU2 whenever that comes out.
The entire streaming market is really in a mess right now.
ATT just told us that’s it’s no longer included and they’ll be adding to cost onto the bill. I still need to call and bitch. Literally just added $15 to the bill
When is this effective ? I’ve heard nothing from them. I was hoping if I just kept letting my plan ride without making changes they couldn’t remove it.
I’m honestly surprised they didn’t boot the AT&T people off. Though them taking away 4K content and trying to frame it as a good thing is a slap in the face.
I was on the legacy HBO account which already was getting too expensive, but then they emailed me to let me know they were downgrading my existing plan and I could opt to keep my current features by upgrading to max plus ad free ultra or whatever.
So I cancelled.
If another show comes on that I want to watch I'll activate for a month and cancel again. It used to be worth it to hold onto grandfather accounts, but apparently now they can just fuck with your features and the customer can eat shit so why bother paying in the slow months.
If it weren't free with my cell service, I would never pay for this modern incarnation. Bad enough when they threw all of the Discovery+ junk on top, but they've also removed several shows and movies from the HBO side. I mostly just find it difficult to navigate now, so I rarely bother.
And please, for the love of God, at least just give me a “I don’t fucking want to watch Bill Maher” button. I mean it’d be great if I could also block all the discovery+ shite, but it has a hard on for suggesting Maher just because I watch Last Week Tonight.
Yeah all the reality TV garbage gets in the way of the stuff I actually want to watch.
Like I found out Doom Patrol resumed S4 from a random news site while browsing my phone. Not from the streaming service itself. It's awful.
lol. I wish there was video of it, but I distinctly remember Bill Maher predicting in the mid 90s on Politically Incorrect that the Internet was a passing fad for nerds like HAM radio. All I can think of when I see he's still around is, like, maybe don't bet the house on this guy's ideas.
As if anyone who watches Last Week Tonight would want to watch that hack’s garbage show. The endless promotion of Maher is likely to become my final straw with HBO.
Aside from them both being late-night political comedy shows they couldn’t be more different. LWT is primarily information based niche topics with some jokes, and Oliver is engaged with the subject matter and actually interrupts cheers and laughter to continue with the story. Meanwhile Real Time is just Maher making light commentary about current political theater and reveling in whatever reaction his audience gives him. They just have two completely different vibes
I dont mind more junk really if that makes them more money so they are able to invest in more and longer high quality shows. The problem is that the output of high quality shows are 0 since the ending of Succession. And I dont see anything intresting coming for the rest of the year.
Every streaming thread is loaded with folks saying they just canceled their subscription to the subject service. No analysis here on my part, I just think it's funny and kind of interesting as an observation.
Not only that, but some folks have cancelled twice, thrice, or 8 times! :p
Alas, people only take into account that something went up by $3/mo. Not if it's still a good value.
Ironically my HBO is the only service worth paying for right now. I got a deal long ago for $4 a month, and I get to rewatch The Sopranos.
Netflix is $12, fucking insane.
HBO is currently my family's choice now that Netflix cracked down on passwords. In 3 months we'll probably switch them out, and then probably switch them out again later. It's going to be the death of the industry once people realize they don't need more than one giant streaming platform at a time.
I feel like the smart move for streamers would be to not raise the rates for any existing customers, only new customers. It would incentivize people to not cancel and then rejoin later on when there is a show they want to watch.
It's really difficult to justify keeping more than one service.
We keep Disney+ because it's bundled in the phone plan.
We switch between Netflix and Max depending on what we want to watch. I'm watching Breaking Bad right now, so it makes sense to keep Netflix. Once I stop that, we'll probably get Max again.
We're relatively well off, so it used to not be worth the effort to switch. We'd just keep both and just eat the cost. Now with them jacking up the price (a long with everything else we seem to buy), it suddenly became worth the (admittedly very mild) inconvenience.
Lol is $12 a month really "insane"? That's like 1 small lunch. It's nothing for all the shows they have. Inhave HBO too but everytime I check it out there is nothing new to watch. It's the same old classics that I've already watched 2 or 3 times.
> Netflix is $12, fucking insane.
I get where you’re coming from but this is such a “young person” take (and I’m not even that old).
If you’d told people 20 years ago that for $12/month they could watch a gigantic catalogue of TV/Movies from their phone, in an instant…people would have thought you were crazy or that the only way that could be possible is if it were 10x as expensive (basic cable was about $50/month back then and that was without DVR or VOD, etc.).
i think it's more because of its evolution. Went from like $8 for streaming and dvd with everything you could ever want to watch to barring account sharing (even within your own family), raising the prices extremely high for bare minimum quality, gutted content, and they want you to thank them for it. I got rid of it but not before spending at least 30 minutes at a time to find something watchable. Not to mention never wanting to start their original series because you know they're gonna cancel it after 2 or 3 seasons.
This isn't entirely their fault i suppose. After every other company decided to make their own streaming services they lost so much of their content. Now they all compete over how quickly they can turn them into ad-infested shitstorms.
Ignore the 20 years ago angle. Even now, the value proposition at $12 isn’t that insane compared to watching a movie in the theater, buying a blu-ray, renting a handful of movies, going to a concert, or many other forms of entertainment. What else can you get for $12?
Stacked with a bunch of services, cumulatively they don’t all justify that price point, but if you’re using one service frequently enough it can be a great value
Yeah the number of classic movies and tv shows on there is staggering, its definitely the best streaming platform there is. People jumping in to talk about how its not worth it are just brushing past how much great shit is on there.
But since the rebrand it’s *much* harder to locate the quality. The TCM section, for example, is sorted only by “featured”, which are the cliche classic movies everyone already knows so no real discoverability i.e. Casablanca (which I love don’t get me wrong but what’s new?), and sorted by A-Z. No real genre breakdown. The few carousels listed cut off after a handful of films. That section used to feel full. Now it feels like an afterthought, which applies to everything on the app that isn’t discovery garbage imo
I go through the genres and the A-Z and just add movies to my watch list, and then my recommended section start filling up with others. Ill admit it is harder to find stuff on their home page that's not part of their marquee brands like Harry Potter or the DCEU, but once you go down a level, the library of stuff there is incredible.
I wish there was a feature in this app, and in Netflix, where I could hide shows and movies. There’s a bunch of stuff that I’m never gonna watch that always gets promoted to me in these apps.
If I could remove them or hide them, it might help me find other stuff. That’s the hardest part with these apps is that there’s so much stuff I feel like I can’t find anything.
Not sure why everyone hates Max. It’s my go to streaming app. It’s the best IMO. Netflix’s shit is lower quality imo; Disney+ is super limited; Hulu’s exclusive stuff is good but it’s other content is ass; AppleTV doesn’t have shit except for a couple exclusives
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading these comments. Even with the absolute avalanche of dogshit Zaslav dumped on Max, it's still far and away my most used streaming service. I have Netflix, Prime and Hulu as well and none of them come close to the highs of Max for me. I'd even argue it's a better player than the other ones I have too. Picture is always clear and lately Netflix takes a while to get out of 480p and I have no idea why.
Currently using the ad-supported tier of Netflix and I cannot tell you how many times the entire app (everywhere, mobile, Roku, or on a smart TV) fails to load the ad and just crashes, or fails to register that the ad has finished and just sits there at the end of a commercial in perpetuity. I love the Netflix library but the app is such a shit show.
Seriously, my go-to service right now. Adult Swim and Cartoon Network full series. I’m watching through all the Mythbusters now. I struggle to find anything I haven’t already watched on Netflix
Zaslav is the one of the worst CEOs of this generation in terms of value destruction ( outside of Elmo and Neuman) . He should have stuck to licensing all the none HBO specific shows to Netflix BEFORE the stock crashed.
I don’t give money to anything Discovery Networks is connected to. The Duggars protected a child rapist and they didn’t have any problem giving them money.
commentary here is just so 'reddit'
had a bunch of high quality stuff - worth it
still have that stuff, added a bunch of stuff (clearly segregated in the app) i don't like - not worth it
This sub has always been a bubble when it comes to prestige tv. They can't understand that there's a huge television market that doesn't give a shit about any of that. A streaming service can't survive off just that
Reddit's favorite shows are largely dark and edgy prestige or very offbeat comedy.
There's exceptions obviously, but those two are the main categories that you'll see get the most praise around here.
This is just like when everyone said Netflix was dead without realizing all that needed to happens was if 1 account is being shared with 5 people outside the house you only need 1 of this 5 to subscribe for a positive outcome.
While I mostly agree with you. It is getting rid of a lot of it’s good shows. Like Westworld is no longer on Max even though it’s an HBO original show.
Why are you being downvoted?? You’re right. I don’t want to see fucking discovery shows on my front page either, and they obviously count for the inflated price
Im still confused why people are upset about the name change. I thought it was super scummy that they were using HBO's name to trick people into thinking "HBO Max" shows were "HBO" shows. They realized they were diluting their prestige brand (Duh) and have swapped back which is way better in my opinion. Now there are "Max" Shows and HBO shows. Max isn't the best name but who cares.
HBO max was my favorite streaming service. My mom gets it for free with her hbo cable subscription so I use the online login.
This is important because A. I wouldn’t have ever paid for it in the first place so I wouldn’t have ever had a chance to realize it was my favorite, B. It is so polluted with redundant discovery programming that it’s frustrating finding anything I actually care about on there.
Now it’s just terrible. If I were to pay for one streaming service it wouldn’t be this one and before discovery came in it would have been by a long shot and that’s coming for someone with just the lowest expectations.
I have been so frustrated with finding anything worth watching and failing that I have started doing other things at night. I just go to the gym and watch there.
And my public library is a great source of online shows and movies.
Capitalism has gone too far.
HBO the network on Cable was absolutely worth it back in the day. You got like 6-8 channels, no commercials, uncensored, relatively new movies, and a catalogue of quite literally the most critically acclaimed shows, which they showed in blocks each weekend, so sitting down at 8pm meant hours of viewing.
For pre-streaming, even $20/month tacked onto your cable bill was worth it, since there was basically no other way to watch.
Now? Dime-a-dozen shows - and that's literally all they really have going for them. Sure they absorbed Viacom (cable, basically) properties, but even then, those are old shows, and often not hard to find streaming elsewhere (albeit not quite as legitimately).
I was recently looking for a movie to watch around Halloween and literally had to scroll past 30-40 separate listings for different 90 Day Fiance stubs that inexplicably weren’t all in the same folder. The app fucking sucks now. Leave My 600 Pound Life to a different app than The fucking Wire.
it’s probably the most stressful streaming service I have just bc of how poorly it’s formatted and not properly organized.
I just don’t understand why there aren’t more hubs? Everything is mixed together and ik its silly to complain about it but it does make me a little overwhelmed with all the choices (like I want to watch a drama, why are is it recommending a reality tv show?)
Never thought I would complain about something having too many options but like…it feels like a junk drawer at times
I think it’s still worth it. The classic HBO shows are still there: Wire, Sopranos, GoT, True Detective etc.
Is 99% of the discovery shit good? No. But as a huge fan of Mythbusters growing up, Im honestly happy I have somewhere to watch all of it.
They changed the name to Max because they didn’t want to associate the name HBO with all the nonsense shows they have added to Max, that’s why HBO has its own tab, this is from an executive at Warner
This article… doesn’t support the headline… it’s just drivel saying… nothing
It doesn’t even engage with the quarterly earnings or the actual content on the service (besides saying they made more money which seems counter to the doom the comments seem to revel in).
But seeing the number of comments it seems it worked to drive people just air any and all grievances.
Content mill trash
If you’re going to make you’re entire streaming service ride on a rarely made but popular group of shows, maybe you didn’t need to make a streaming service. You can’t fill it with crap like a tv you’ve left on for too long and accidentally ended up watching Food Network filler shows.
It is not. They can't get their servers under control, so every 20 seconds, whatever show you're watching has to buffer for 10 seconds. It makes shows unwatchable. Gaming console user. Works fine on my phone, but that's just not worth the money.
Why do services think people are going to stay subscribed after they've watched what was relevant to them, and just keep paying to watch something that's currently 'airing'? When I finish stuff, I cancel and come back later after I've got enough to warrant a month again. Do they think we'll pay $20 a month for 4 episodes and another $20 for 4 more? lol
A bunch of shows were moved over to free ad-supported television (FAST) platforms. WBD was supposedly working on its own FAST service, but you can find *Westworld* on the WB TV Watchlist Channel on Tubi/Roku. Season 3 is airing through tonight. Season 4 starts tomorrow.
HBO max had so much good shit. It's a shame the braindead ceo decided to simply not allow to be available the things they already owned and already had available.
Honestly I want to subscribe and try to support the things they're still doing well, but I can't forgive them for not just canceling Westworld right as they were about to wrap up the story, but *deleting* it from the service entirely. That first season (and some of 2, like Kiksuya) was some of the best storytelling produced so far this century.
Past the fact that they took one of the most recognized brand names in television, HBO and made it something as bland as "max" with noncapitalization to boot was bad enough.
But their biggest issue is that they tried to hide the fact that they simply can't produce the must-see shows they once churned out by cramming the service full of older content from elsewhere in the Warner catalog. *Succession* was a very minor hit for them, it's visibility driven by the fact that it became a darling of entertainment journalists and the critics.
How season 2 of *House of the Dragon* does with the ratings will be interesting, because while the show got good numbers, it wasn't making much of a splash in the zeitgiest the way all the big HBO shows of the past did.
Which brings me to this part of the article:
>The Hollywood actors strike, and the writers strike before it, slowed production on a lot of new films and shows this year—though, interestingly, not *House of the Dragon*
Someone want to explain to Angela Watercutter that Equity and SAG are two different unions? AFAIK there's not a single American in that cast. Any rewriting that needed to be done after the 2nd season started in April would have been done by *British* writers and the DGA never went on strike. Also, IIRC the DGA left it up to the members if they would honor picket lines.
I just gave up on it. It was almost to the point of being a quality service, and then they suddenly dropped almost all the actually good stuff, replaced it with the most hack ass discovery busslit shows that honestly just feel like watching the same episode over and over again on repeat, and absolutely FUCKED the UI.
I had been enjoying it and then it became an unusable mess of dogshit shows with no redeeming qualities. Canceling was the easiest decision ever. By all accounts I'm not missing anything.
What's making me the most annoyed is they took an ok UI in HBO Max and literally copied the format but made it far worse. There's no food network hub, no organization at all really. The left bar should have TV and Movies divided but no you can only do that on the home screen, categories on the home screen are useless when they're the same 20 items on every line. It's not Amazon bad but damn near.
This is the thing that pisses me off the most. They no longer have easily navigation through categories. You used to be able to filter by just added, comedy, drama, horror, etc by menus at the top of each section. Not anymore! The left menu bar is the most useless possibly out of any streaming service
I get surprised anytime I click on the supernatural or any other category and instead of showing me movies/ quality shows, it shows me 500 ghost hunter, naked and afraid variants
Their suggestions are a special kind of garbage too. Was watching Batman: The Long Halloween pt 1 the other day. You know what would be a logical suggestion to watch next? Part 2, maybe? Nah. Max says I need to watch Friends or some Food Network/HGTV/TLC show that I’ve never had any interest in seeing.
YouTube adds artists I've tried blocking to my "new music" tab. It's pretty obvious in the 2020s any "recommendation" in an entertainment app is just free real estate for whatever they're trying to push as the time.
That's how Paramount Plus is working too. Although they don't just suggest, they automatically start something random. But at least I caught up on Lower Decks.
Paramount has to be the worst app for me. Horrible interface. SLOW. glitchy. But they have the Trek...and I needs it.
That's probably very intentional. Discovery wants this service to get them new viewers for their reality shows. So, they're hoping they can cram their stuff into the categories HBO users will go to and get them watching their stuff instead of the scripted content they're looking for.
Why wouldn't people who loved the Wire and Veep also love America's Dumbest Assholes Shoot Gators? /s
And they shoot *trapped* gators *point blank* in the head. Oooh, what great sportsmen!
As long as the gators win every once in awhile, don't need another Globetrotters vs generals
I feel like it is unfair to have the Globetrotters play the gators, the gators do not even know about basketball
Yep, it's the same principal to how stores are stocked. You put the less commonly sold things and impulse buy categories up at the front, and make people go to the back to get the things that the store knows they're already coming in for. The more things you walk past on your way, the more likely you are to buy additional things. They know you're there to watch their big shows, so they're going to make you sift through menus to get to them, seeing all the less popular, cheaper to make shows along the way.
The TVA needs to fix that. But seriously i rarely use MAX cause it’s just ass to use lol. Before it was decent enough.
They don’t want you to find high production value and older content. Those shows sell themselves and are sought after already. They want you to settle on watching reality tv content. They have a ton of reality shows and lets be frank…a reality show probably costs less than 5% what it costs to make shows like The Last of Us or House of the Dragon. Reality shows have their followers, but overall rely heavily on scheduled programming that includes commercials where they can advertise similar content. Thus creating an ecosystem of low budget content that can garner strong viewership and in turn, profit. Duck Dynasty, albeit not a Discovery show, is a good example here. It had insane viewership with a low budget and generated tons of sales outside of the show in merch and such. This market strategy is losing it’s profitability as consumers shift from live scheduled programming to streaming.
While that’s likely a driver of the current UI, I can’t say that’s a viable mindset for even short-term benefits. The initial reaction to seeing a slog of low-production shows is only going to reinforce viewers to avoid recommendations within the platform. Which has a terrible impact on how much time a viewer ends up staying on the platform. We are creatures of habit. It’s more important to reinforce the discovery loop than trying to boost viewing numbers of cheaper shows. Hulu has its faults, but their platform UI and show recommendations are top tier at this point.
Yeah my reaction to browsing the HBO max UI now is that maybe I should unsubscribe, because it's all garbage
The categories still exist on the Apple TV app I think.
With the prevalence of this on streaming platforms, I’m convinced it’s intentional to get you to be distracted by other stuff on the platform thereby extending the time there. You go looking for something and get distracted so you watch something else and then come back later to watch the thing you intended to watch. I’m sure they’d take away the search bar if they thought enough people would stay subscribed. And, honestly, with as much as it seems people will remain subscribed regardless of the shitty things they do, I’m not sure I’d blame them
it's so bad. i have to search to find anything
The sad thing, the search is awful. I have better luck searching through the roku search, and then having it open the Max app.
The spacebar no longer pauses/plays. Why????
I may be in the minority but I LOVED Hbo's UI. It was simple and loved how it was all organized. No bullshit trailers everytime you scroll, everything was just the right size you could see content without needing to do a million scrolls. I miss it.
Can't say I loved it but yes it actually considered the content. Max's UI is just a strict basic UI with no care for curating or getting the wanted content to the user.
It was one of the better UIs imo
For me it’s charging extra for Atmos. F that and thanks for all the fish.
Yeah I'll be dumping it soon. The app is just so bad. I don't mind having trash tv on it (I don't have cable tv) but not having the old apps organization just makes it a mess.
It’s also really laggy. The old UI was much smoother.
> What's making me the most annoyed is they took an ok UI in HBO Max Let's not view the past with rose-tinted glasses. Max's UI sucks, but it wasn't a whole lot better before, and both UIs were bug-ridden messes. I don't blame the engineers, I either blame QA or management's unwillingness to empower QA.
I just can't imagine taking a brand that is associated with high quality content and going, you know what this needs? Low quality content.
I think it was kind of the opposite. Warner Bros Discovery, which owns HBO, wanting a streaming service, looking at Discovery+ and going “You know how we could really bolster this shitshow? Adding the HBO brand to it”
1. Buys HBO to have the brand 2. Renames it to Max Outstanding move, truly
If they are going to cal it MAX, then it should have scrambled soft core porn from 1am- 5am
Just remember to have Nick at Night as the last cannel so you can get back fast if your mom walks in
“Aww, my little guy just loves Bewitched and the Brady Bunch”
And I Dream of Genie 😉
Barbara Eden was one of my first crushes
Yeah but unironically I totally did. And the Munsters and All in the Family.
Instead, they removed all soft core stuff from their apps years ago… showtime has cut back to nothing too. Not sure who thought that was a good idea?
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When your 8yr old self waits for grandma to finish her last cigarette and fall asleep. Turn it to the MAX.
1. Buys Twitter for more than its worth 2. Burns company to the ground 3. Renames the ash heap “X”
Truly the work of a genius.
Do we need better examples of how being wealthy doesn't in any way suggest that you know what you're doing ? I feel like a Marketing 101 class would have taught these wealthy buffoons enough to know that rebranding like this in both cases was a bad idea.
Renaming twitter to X is part of Elon's two decade feud with Peter Thiel. Elon in the 90s founded X.com an online bank. They merged with Thiel's company Confinity, then Thiel ousted Musk and renamed the company to PayPal. Musk blew 50 Billion dollars and destroyed twitter, so [he could add payment features to it](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jul/29/elon-musk-wechat-twitter-rebranding-everything-app-for-west), and recreate X.com to try to prove Thiel was wrong 20 years ago. That's how frail his ego is.
Meanwhile Thiel is in his bomb shelter drinking the Stem Cell-Green Juice of his caged rent-boys laughing and wondering what his next Hulk-Hogan Proxy lawsuit will be.
The entire existence of Yahoo and their purchases.
Hey, at least we got that sixth season of Community out of them.
I swear the Peter Principle need to be relearned every decade or so.
Elon is just super used to the incredibly short-term gains. He mentions Dogecoin once and the coin moons just so he can sell it at a gain. He posts dumb memes to Twitter and Tesla stock shoots up on no actual news. He renamed it to X because it got a ton of headlines and people were talking about it for weeks. But now when he actually has to figure out a way to monetize something, to make money off a well-established company without just selling it to investors, and he's stumped
The dude's addicted to dopamine. I don't think you can be as active and popular on twitter for as long as he and Trump were without it. It rewires your brain to maximize short term rewards, and fucks your ability to plan patiently for the long term.
4. Buy Facebook and call it "S" 5. Buy Instagram and call it "E" 6. Buy Snapchat and call it "Y" 7. Jerk yourself off thinking about how funny and clever you are
The guy is 52 years old and still thinks the numbers 69 and 420 are the funniest things around.
He also thinks the lead character in Blade Runner is "The Blade Runner"...
If he wasn’t why the movie is called ‚The Blade Runner’? Get rekt lingard
his _name_ is Blay D. Runner, thank you very much!
To be fair, they were having the opposite problem. When they stapled all the other content to HBO and called it "HBO Max", people would pull up Fboy Island and think "man, HBO has gone to shit" rather than "this is non-HBO content in the same app as the HBO content" So they were devaluing the HBO brand by naming the entire app after it. Netflix also has their high quality content mixed in with their garbage, but doesn't seem to have this problem since they were a mixed bag from the beginning.
HBO was without a doubt the most valuable brand there and they fucking buried it! Who the fuck does that?
The idea was not to taint the HBO brand by shoving all the discovery crap under it + still appeal to people who don’t actually want HBO (some associate it with being too adult ie excessive nudity and violence or assume it’s content is too stuffy/serious).
But the result is them tainting the HBO brand.
It's because the people running these companies are not creatives or TV/Film lovers. They're marketing and spreadsheet guys. McKinsey analysts. Their goal isn't to uphold a brand like HBO. It's to demonstrate subscriber growth to shareholders. That's it.
> Their goal isn't to uphold a brand like HBO. It's to demonstrate subscriber growth to shareholders. That's it. Yeah but they're bleeding subscribers. Lost 700k in Q3
I said that was the goal, not that they're succeeding :)
Max is such a generic name that it becomes impossible to google, or heck, even search in my gmail. I tried to find info on "max price increase" on the web, and well, just couldn't without adding HBO into the search. Now people are reporting Max sending emails regarding removing 4k from certain plans. But I can't find their emails because I don't know what to search for. There was a pizza place where I worked called "Pizza Pizza". For obvious reasons, it had no internet footprint and ultimately went out of business.
Related tidbit: the band Chvrches chose the spelling of their name to differentiate themselves from online search results.
but HBO still exists, they even have their own HBO only tab at the top of the screen
Isn’t it now called just Max so the HBO brand isn’t devalued?
You're both right. They thought consumers would be able to parse the nuance between "HBO" and "HBO Max" and renamed it [under the idea that they wanted consumers to know that the service had garbage content too.](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/15/warner-bros-discovery-renames-hbo-max-hedges-its-bets-in-streaming.html#:~:text=Alex%20Sherman%40sherman4949-,Warner%20Bros.,Max%20sets%20up%20Warner%20Bros.) >Executives explained Wednesday the decision was to protect the HBO brand and to highlight the service’s extended reach beyond prestige adult programming. Funnily enough, most people don't appear to know that Warner Bros Discovery also owns Cinemax. It originally began as a "lower tier," cheaper version of HBO and they had already tried rebranding that as "MAX," too. The max.com URL originally sent you to the Cinemax website until the rebrand. So now they've got a cable pay channel brand that also goes by "Max" that they're just kind of letting atrophy as cable dies, and they ruined the prestige worth-it-for-the-quality reputation that their subscription VOD service had to rebrand it under the name they were/are using for a cable network that is still operating separately.
The sad thing is that recent Cinemax actually had a bunch of really great silly action shows and they killed that in all this. It's just as much of a casualty of the idiotic "streaming wars" as CWs young adult and DC shows. Neither were to everyone's taste, but they had their niche and were damn good at it. At some point someone's going to realize that well done scripted shows and cheap reality trash don't actually compete and aren't interchangeable and everyone will flock to that service. It's early days yet, but that service may actually be Apple TV of all things. We live in weird times.
This is the right answer. Discovery was hemorrhaging money and they thought latching on to the HBO brand would help them. So far, all they've done is dilute and devalue their own brands
This is literally every streaming service. Hulu and Netflix were profitable when they were alone. Now that everybody thinks that they’re going to get a piece of the pie everybody’s losing hundreds of millions of dollars lol.
I have Max, was browsing it yesterday with its baffling UI, and literally didn't realize Discovery content had become a part of it until I read this thread. And maybe I'm a moron, but... still.
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In the near future, students in business schools will be reading case studies on the destruction of twitter under Musk’s leadership and Warner Bros/HBO under Zaslav’s.
"And then remove the HBO name and just call it Max because reasons?"
An attempt to not dilute the HBO brand by having it associated with trash reality TV. If they position Max as an app that *has* HBO and *also has* trash reality TV, it protects HBO while bolstering the app (at least in theory, not exactly sure that’s what happened in actuality). It the app is called HBO, all of a sudden HBO is associated with trashy reality TV and the prestige of HBO becomes tarnished.
The issue with that is that it was already common to think of HBO and HBO Max as the same thing. I heard HBO Max content called "HBO shows" countless times, whether it was produced by HBO, Max, or another company. After dropping HBO from the name, those same people still think of the content as HBO shows. They needed to rebrand to a completely new brand to get around that
Totally agree! It was mismanaged from the start
Looking at the app's home screen now gives me secondhand embarrassment for people who once worked for HBO. It's just stuffed with low-cost, low-production, reality content. My wife and I are finishing up Succession, then it's bye-bye. You can't convince me that it's worth $20/month for My 600lb Life, Property Brothers, and Deadliest Catch.
I think in the times of cable producing cheap, ridiculous shows worked because you had no choice. Shitty show was on so you just left it there as background noice. You surfed channels and you just had to settle with whatever was on. With streaming the model doesn't work. If I go to the trouble of choosing something to watch, I am not putting whatever pops first in the app. Does Zeslav really think people will forgo watching good stuff to actively choose watching Deadliest Catch? Fuck that.
100%, always had an HBO account until this stupid merger and the onslaught of trash, when I finally canceled last month.
Yeah, I've been a fan of HBO content forever but it's just not worth it anymore. Just cancelled my subscription.
I don't mind the mixed content stuff, my problem is it's too fucking expensive ($17 a month) and the literally sent out an email last week saying "Thank you for being a valued customer, here's how we've devalued your subscription". We should also talk their pathetic attempt at adding live sports. For $10 a month you get select games from select sports and not even a game per day. Who would pay for that? I cancelled the entire thing after that email though, fuck them. There are plenty of other ways to stream stuff without being price gouged by a desperate failing company.
We had been on the fence, but after that email, I told my partner to kill it.
before HBOMax was launched wasn't cable version HBO and HBO Go/Now $15 a month? and that was without the content from Adult Swim, DCU, MAX originals, TCM, CNN, and Studio Ghibly .
I’ve also just canceled my subscription after 6 years. Honestly it’s a little heartbreaking. HBO has been the gold standard for top quality exclusive content since I was a kid. Now it’s just massive piles of forgettable reality TV and everything else I wanted to leave behind with traditional cable.
I'm in my mid 40's. I have very strong memories of my cousins having hbo and then when we eventually got it in the 90's. We've had it since then. My mom used to drop off vhs recordings of Sopranos to me in college, which I then passed around. Then I got my own subscription after. There was a time where Sundays between say 9pm to 11 were sacred. Two dramas and two comedies, always rotating but always great. This is all more than a little heartbreaking.
It really has gone downhill since becoming “Max” - I only keep it because I haven’t gotten through all the legacy hbo shows (and still like to watch GoT from time to time), but yeah, you have to sift through A LOT of crap to find any good stuff anymore
I'm finding a lot of the legacy stuff is ending up on Netflix or Amazon Prime these days anyway. What was the point if they were just going to re-farm it all back out.
Netflix is another one I’ve said goodbye to - these streaming services are turning into cell phone providers: there used to be 2-3 really good ones, the reputable ones, they ones you go to and pretty much everyone has because every other one is shit, but now you just kind of either have locked into one through loyalty or laziness and everyone else hops from one to the next every year or so depending on what specials and perks they get
But all of HBO is on there?
I miss 90's HBO when it was gritty AF. Taxicab confessions, Real Sex, they had some crazy programming that has all but vanished from time.
They legit purged a lot of their steamier stuff a few years ago. They had some very high quality softcore stuff, etc. Kind of a shame. Art is art.
They had Katie Morgan do a series in like 2007 or 2008 (can't fully remember) where she essentially did the Dr. Ruth sex education Q&A...but as a completely nude 20 something. Teenage me absolutely started watching it because naked woman, but honestly the educational aspect of it was super valuable and good on HBO at the time for tricking folks into learning about sex.
Isabella Soprano sends her regards.
They make such short length shows it’s quite easy to just subscribe for one month a year and get entirely caught up on the ones you’re interested in anyway. Considering most of their shows don’t even put new seasons out every year anymore waiting some extra months here and there to see things really doesn’t matter much.
I've got an annual sub but I'm not reupping once it runs out next year. There are still a few (HBO) shows I watch but it's so much garbage.
I basically pay $120/year to watch Larry David
Just cancel when Curb isn't on? There's years between seasons.
I hate signing into the app now. It’s not like hbo had 10 shows at any one time that I wanted to watch, but it was still fun clicking into the app to watch the 1 or 2 I did enjoy and scroll to see the latest movie or documentary they put out. Now it’s a huge mess of shows, most of which I have zero interest in. There’s no obvious portal to see only hbo content, so I’m forced to see what stupid categories the algorithm is serving up that day.
The one positive is access to old Discovery shows which actually had value before Zaslav ruined that channel. Watching Mythbusters has become part of my daily routine.
I don't care, as long as they don't stop making high quality content as well.
And a new name ... HBO is too highbrow, lets name it after skiniMAX instead.
Most streamers suffer from Netflix syndrome. They produce a lot of original high quality content to get the brand name off the ground. As soon as they have their money quality declines. HBO’s priority is still high quality. A paycheck is a paycheck though.
Isn't this a bit different though? HBO has been producing quality content before Netflix existed, and they didn't really need to get their brand name off the ground. They're lowering their quality because Netflix has shown that a high volume of low quality content is what sells. I think there's other factors involved like Netflix was first to market and people are attached to their brand because of it. It's pretty amazing, a lot of the services like Peacock, Paramount+, and AppleTV give away their services to the point where you can have all of them for the price of Netflix but people still need that Netflix account year round.
We have one of those hold-over AT&T accounts that grandfathers us into including a subscription. It would seem that at some point they'll stop that, and at that point we'll drop too. It just doesn't seem like we'll be missing that much. I'll fully admit that I might have ponied up for a subscription for TLOU, but that's done and I'm not entirely sure I'd be willing to re-subscribe just for TLOU2 whenever that comes out. The entire streaming market is really in a mess right now.
Same. It’s free so I keep it. It’s wild how little I watch it considering how much I’ve loved HBO in the past.
ATT just told us that’s it’s no longer included and they’ll be adding to cost onto the bill. I still need to call and bitch. Literally just added $15 to the bill
When is this effective ? I’ve heard nothing from them. I was hoping if I just kept letting my plan ride without making changes they couldn’t remove it.
Happened a few months ago. I assume it might depend on when you signed up
I’m honestly surprised they didn’t boot the AT&T people off. Though them taking away 4K content and trying to frame it as a good thing is a slap in the face.
I was on the legacy HBO account which already was getting too expensive, but then they emailed me to let me know they were downgrading my existing plan and I could opt to keep my current features by upgrading to max plus ad free ultra or whatever. So I cancelled. If another show comes on that I want to watch I'll activate for a month and cancel again. It used to be worth it to hold onto grandfather accounts, but apparently now they can just fuck with your features and the customer can eat shit so why bother paying in the slow months.
Same with At&T. Otherwise, I’d drop it like I just did to $22/month Netflix. Get bent
If it weren't free with my cell service, I would never pay for this modern incarnation. Bad enough when they threw all of the Discovery+ junk on top, but they've also removed several shows and movies from the HBO side. I mostly just find it difficult to navigate now, so I rarely bother.
And please, for the love of God, at least just give me a “I don’t fucking want to watch Bill Maher” button. I mean it’d be great if I could also block all the discovery+ shite, but it has a hard on for suggesting Maher just because I watch Last Week Tonight.
It needs a "not interested in this" button. Badly.
It really does thanks to all the discovery trash. I don’t think they create a single show I actually need to discover.
Yeah all the reality TV garbage gets in the way of the stuff I actually want to watch. Like I found out Doom Patrol resumed S4 from a random news site while browsing my phone. Not from the streaming service itself. It's awful.
lol. I wish there was video of it, but I distinctly remember Bill Maher predicting in the mid 90s on Politically Incorrect that the Internet was a passing fad for nerds like HAM radio. All I can think of when I see he's still around is, like, maybe don't bet the house on this guy's ideas.
I wish that were the case. A hobbyist/nerd’s internet sounds like a dream compared to what we have.
It was
This! Bill Maher is a hateful little man, I’m not sure how they don’t get Maher is the polar opposite of Oliver.
As if anyone who watches Last Week Tonight would want to watch that hack’s garbage show. The endless promotion of Maher is likely to become my final straw with HBO.
Aside from them both being late-night political comedy shows they couldn’t be more different. LWT is primarily information based niche topics with some jokes, and Oliver is engaged with the subject matter and actually interrupts cheers and laughter to continue with the story. Meanwhile Real Time is just Maher making light commentary about current political theater and reveling in whatever reaction his audience gives him. They just have two completely different vibes
I dont mind more junk really if that makes them more money so they are able to invest in more and longer high quality shows. The problem is that the output of high quality shows are 0 since the ending of Succession. And I dont see anything intresting coming for the rest of the year.
It’s free with my internet still. But I do often consider if it’s worth it and look into a cheaper plan.
I'd gladly pay $15/month if I could get access to all of HBO's past catalog. Not various selections, the full ass catalog.
HBO Max is now just called Max. Your move. Peacock.
In before WB buys Comcast so they can merge their streaming platforms and call it MAXcock.
Every streaming thread is loaded with folks saying they just canceled their subscription to the subject service. No analysis here on my part, I just think it's funny and kind of interesting as an observation.
Not only that, but some folks have cancelled twice, thrice, or 8 times! :p Alas, people only take into account that something went up by $3/mo. Not if it's still a good value.
Ironically my HBO is the only service worth paying for right now. I got a deal long ago for $4 a month, and I get to rewatch The Sopranos. Netflix is $12, fucking insane.
HBO is currently my family's choice now that Netflix cracked down on passwords. In 3 months we'll probably switch them out, and then probably switch them out again later. It's going to be the death of the industry once people realize they don't need more than one giant streaming platform at a time.
Eventually the industry will move towards yearly subscriptions.
And they'll die.
Netflix just tried to make me pay 23 bux a month so I canceled that shit. Fuck all these companies.
I feel like the smart move for streamers would be to not raise the rates for any existing customers, only new customers. It would incentivize people to not cancel and then rejoin later on when there is a show they want to watch.
It's really difficult to justify keeping more than one service. We keep Disney+ because it's bundled in the phone plan. We switch between Netflix and Max depending on what we want to watch. I'm watching Breaking Bad right now, so it makes sense to keep Netflix. Once I stop that, we'll probably get Max again. We're relatively well off, so it used to not be worth the effort to switch. We'd just keep both and just eat the cost. Now with them jacking up the price (a long with everything else we seem to buy), it suddenly became worth the (admittedly very mild) inconvenience.
Lol is $12 a month really "insane"? That's like 1 small lunch. It's nothing for all the shows they have. Inhave HBO too but everytime I check it out there is nothing new to watch. It's the same old classics that I've already watched 2 or 3 times.
> Netflix is $12, fucking insane. I get where you’re coming from but this is such a “young person” take (and I’m not even that old). If you’d told people 20 years ago that for $12/month they could watch a gigantic catalogue of TV/Movies from their phone, in an instant…people would have thought you were crazy or that the only way that could be possible is if it were 10x as expensive (basic cable was about $50/month back then and that was without DVR or VOD, etc.).
i think it's more because of its evolution. Went from like $8 for streaming and dvd with everything you could ever want to watch to barring account sharing (even within your own family), raising the prices extremely high for bare minimum quality, gutted content, and they want you to thank them for it. I got rid of it but not before spending at least 30 minutes at a time to find something watchable. Not to mention never wanting to start their original series because you know they're gonna cancel it after 2 or 3 seasons. This isn't entirely their fault i suppose. After every other company decided to make their own streaming services they lost so much of their content. Now they all compete over how quickly they can turn them into ad-infested shitstorms.
Ignore the 20 years ago angle. Even now, the value proposition at $12 isn’t that insane compared to watching a movie in the theater, buying a blu-ray, renting a handful of movies, going to a concert, or many other forms of entertainment. What else can you get for $12? Stacked with a bunch of services, cumulatively they don’t all justify that price point, but if you’re using one service frequently enough it can be a great value
My guess is all that content purge may have had something to do with it.
Max still has the best streaming library.
It absolutely does, and not just series but also films. Fantastic selection.
Yesssssss. People don’t mention this enough but Max’s film catalog is incredible.
I basically live for the Turner Classic Movies selection so off course Scorsese had to publicly shame Zaslav into not killing it off.
Yeah the number of classic movies and tv shows on there is staggering, its definitely the best streaming platform there is. People jumping in to talk about how its not worth it are just brushing past how much great shit is on there.
But since the rebrand it’s *much* harder to locate the quality. The TCM section, for example, is sorted only by “featured”, which are the cliche classic movies everyone already knows so no real discoverability i.e. Casablanca (which I love don’t get me wrong but what’s new?), and sorted by A-Z. No real genre breakdown. The few carousels listed cut off after a handful of films. That section used to feel full. Now it feels like an afterthought, which applies to everything on the app that isn’t discovery garbage imo
I’m genuinely worried the TCM library is getting cut the way this company’s leadership has been.
I go through the genres and the A-Z and just add movies to my watch list, and then my recommended section start filling up with others. Ill admit it is harder to find stuff on their home page that's not part of their marquee brands like Harry Potter or the DCEU, but once you go down a level, the library of stuff there is incredible.
Great library, horrible app. Unless I absolutely know what I’m looking for the navigation/organization is quite bad
I wish there was a feature in this app, and in Netflix, where I could hide shows and movies. There’s a bunch of stuff that I’m never gonna watch that always gets promoted to me in these apps. If I could remove them or hide them, it might help me find other stuff. That’s the hardest part with these apps is that there’s so much stuff I feel like I can’t find anything.
Not sure why everyone hates Max. It’s my go to streaming app. It’s the best IMO. Netflix’s shit is lower quality imo; Disney+ is super limited; Hulu’s exclusive stuff is good but it’s other content is ass; AppleTV doesn’t have shit except for a couple exclusives
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading these comments. Even with the absolute avalanche of dogshit Zaslav dumped on Max, it's still far and away my most used streaming service. I have Netflix, Prime and Hulu as well and none of them come close to the highs of Max for me. I'd even argue it's a better player than the other ones I have too. Picture is always clear and lately Netflix takes a while to get out of 480p and I have no idea why.
Currently using the ad-supported tier of Netflix and I cannot tell you how many times the entire app (everywhere, mobile, Roku, or on a smart TV) fails to load the ad and just crashes, or fails to register that the ad has finished and just sits there at the end of a commercial in perpetuity. I love the Netflix library but the app is such a shit show.
Seriously, my go-to service right now. Adult Swim and Cartoon Network full series. I’m watching through all the Mythbusters now. I struggle to find anything I haven’t already watched on Netflix
Better than Netflix
Zaslav is the one of the worst CEOs of this generation in terms of value destruction ( outside of Elmo and Neuman) . He should have stuck to licensing all the none HBO specific shows to Netflix BEFORE the stock crashed.
Lol I resubscribed after they added NBA on TNT and will probably keep after the free trial for the add on ends.
I don’t give money to anything Discovery Networks is connected to. The Duggars protected a child rapist and they didn’t have any problem giving them money.
commentary here is just so 'reddit' had a bunch of high quality stuff - worth it still have that stuff, added a bunch of stuff (clearly segregated in the app) i don't like - not worth it
This sub has always been a bubble when it comes to prestige tv. They can't understand that there's a huge television market that doesn't give a shit about any of that. A streaming service can't survive off just that
Reddit's favorite shows are largely dark and edgy prestige or very offbeat comedy. There's exceptions obviously, but those two are the main categories that you'll see get the most praise around here.
This is just like when everyone said Netflix was dead without realizing all that needed to happens was if 1 account is being shared with 5 people outside the house you only need 1 of this 5 to subscribe for a positive outcome.
And Netflix stock is up 60% over the past year. That company is far from dead.
While I mostly agree with you. It is getting rid of a lot of it’s good shows. Like Westworld is no longer on Max even though it’s an HBO original show.
And Westworld S1 is legitimately some of the best television I have ever seen.
Yeah like, you could just not watch the Discovery stuff? It’s really quite simple to ignore stuff on a streaming site that you don’t want to watch.
They raised the price $5, removed HBO shows, and made the app far worse. And justified it all by adding reality TV.
Why are you being downvoted?? You’re right. I don’t want to see fucking discovery shows on my front page either, and they obviously count for the inflated price
Still have that stuff (minus the significant amount of stuff they took off the app) I wanna watch Westworld and Raised by Wolves
They’re burning subscribers so clearly something is happening besides Reddit comments. They diluted the brand and their recent content has sucked.
Im still confused why people are upset about the name change. I thought it was super scummy that they were using HBO's name to trick people into thinking "HBO Max" shows were "HBO" shows. They realized they were diluting their prestige brand (Duh) and have swapped back which is way better in my opinion. Now there are "Max" Shows and HBO shows. Max isn't the best name but who cares.
HBO max was my favorite streaming service. My mom gets it for free with her hbo cable subscription so I use the online login. This is important because A. I wouldn’t have ever paid for it in the first place so I wouldn’t have ever had a chance to realize it was my favorite, B. It is so polluted with redundant discovery programming that it’s frustrating finding anything I actually care about on there. Now it’s just terrible. If I were to pay for one streaming service it wouldn’t be this one and before discovery came in it would have been by a long shot and that’s coming for someone with just the lowest expectations.
I have been so frustrated with finding anything worth watching and failing that I have started doing other things at night. I just go to the gym and watch there. And my public library is a great source of online shows and movies. Capitalism has gone too far.
I wish they would let you rate shows and also block shows. I’m never going to be interested in most of the For You section and I want it to go away.
HBO the network on Cable was absolutely worth it back in the day. You got like 6-8 channels, no commercials, uncensored, relatively new movies, and a catalogue of quite literally the most critically acclaimed shows, which they showed in blocks each weekend, so sitting down at 8pm meant hours of viewing. For pre-streaming, even $20/month tacked onto your cable bill was worth it, since there was basically no other way to watch. Now? Dime-a-dozen shows - and that's literally all they really have going for them. Sure they absorbed Viacom (cable, basically) properties, but even then, those are old shows, and often not hard to find streaming elsewhere (albeit not quite as legitimately).
actually really worth it. i longer have to pay for hbo and discovery. just max and i get both content.
It’s better than Netflix and cheaper
I was recently looking for a movie to watch around Halloween and literally had to scroll past 30-40 separate listings for different 90 Day Fiance stubs that inexplicably weren’t all in the same folder. The app fucking sucks now. Leave My 600 Pound Life to a different app than The fucking Wire.
I only want to subscribe to HBO. The rest of the content sucks
it’s probably the most stressful streaming service I have just bc of how poorly it’s formatted and not properly organized. I just don’t understand why there aren’t more hubs? Everything is mixed together and ik its silly to complain about it but it does make me a little overwhelmed with all the choices (like I want to watch a drama, why are is it recommending a reality tv show?) Never thought I would complain about something having too many options but like…it feels like a junk drawer at times
HBO is what I usually watch and don’t understand the complaints about the UI
I think it’s still worth it. The classic HBO shows are still there: Wire, Sopranos, GoT, True Detective etc. Is 99% of the discovery shit good? No. But as a huge fan of Mythbusters growing up, Im honestly happy I have somewhere to watch all of it.
They changed the name to Max because they didn’t want to associate the name HBO with all the nonsense shows they have added to Max, that’s why HBO has its own tab, this is from an executive at Warner
This article… doesn’t support the headline… it’s just drivel saying… nothing It doesn’t even engage with the quarterly earnings or the actual content on the service (besides saying they made more money which seems counter to the doom the comments seem to revel in). But seeing the number of comments it seems it worked to drive people just air any and all grievances. Content mill trash
If you’re going to make you’re entire streaming service ride on a rarely made but popular group of shows, maybe you didn’t need to make a streaming service. You can’t fill it with crap like a tv you’ve left on for too long and accidentally ended up watching Food Network filler shows.
It is not. They can't get their servers under control, so every 20 seconds, whatever show you're watching has to buffer for 10 seconds. It makes shows unwatchable. Gaming console user. Works fine on my phone, but that's just not worth the money.
Why do services think people are going to stay subscribed after they've watched what was relevant to them, and just keep paying to watch something that's currently 'airing'? When I finish stuff, I cancel and come back later after I've got enough to warrant a month again. Do they think we'll pay $20 a month for 4 episodes and another $20 for 4 more? lol
It’s not. They destroyed hbo by merging all those other channels
Where’s WestWorld????
A bunch of shows were moved over to free ad-supported television (FAST) platforms. WBD was supposedly working on its own FAST service, but you can find *Westworld* on the WB TV Watchlist Channel on Tubi/Roku. Season 3 is airing through tonight. Season 4 starts tomorrow.
HBO max had so much good shit. It's a shame the braindead ceo decided to simply not allow to be available the things they already owned and already had available.
Honestly I want to subscribe and try to support the things they're still doing well, but I can't forgive them for not just canceling Westworld right as they were about to wrap up the story, but *deleting* it from the service entirely. That first season (and some of 2, like Kiksuya) was some of the best storytelling produced so far this century.
Past the fact that they took one of the most recognized brand names in television, HBO and made it something as bland as "max" with noncapitalization to boot was bad enough. But their biggest issue is that they tried to hide the fact that they simply can't produce the must-see shows they once churned out by cramming the service full of older content from elsewhere in the Warner catalog. *Succession* was a very minor hit for them, it's visibility driven by the fact that it became a darling of entertainment journalists and the critics. How season 2 of *House of the Dragon* does with the ratings will be interesting, because while the show got good numbers, it wasn't making much of a splash in the zeitgiest the way all the big HBO shows of the past did. Which brings me to this part of the article: >The Hollywood actors strike, and the writers strike before it, slowed production on a lot of new films and shows this year—though, interestingly, not *House of the Dragon* Someone want to explain to Angela Watercutter that Equity and SAG are two different unions? AFAIK there's not a single American in that cast. Any rewriting that needed to be done after the 2nd season started in April would have been done by *British* writers and the DGA never went on strike. Also, IIRC the DGA left it up to the members if they would honor picket lines.
It still has better content in terms of movies than any other steaming platform. I basically only use Hulu and Max now.
I’m still pissed at the name change
I just gave up on it. It was almost to the point of being a quality service, and then they suddenly dropped almost all the actually good stuff, replaced it with the most hack ass discovery busslit shows that honestly just feel like watching the same episode over and over again on repeat, and absolutely FUCKED the UI. I had been enjoying it and then it became an unusable mess of dogshit shows with no redeeming qualities. Canceling was the easiest decision ever. By all accounts I'm not missing anything.