HBO Max exec admits to the app’s early flaws | Engadget

Viewers have lengthy complained in regards to the early HBO Max app’s tendency to crash, and its lack of discoverability options. There have been numerous overhauls and fixes since then. Now we all know why. Turns out that HBO Max launched its apps earlier than they have been prepared with a view to sustain with its opponents. The app was “never intended to go global” or to swimsuit the wants of a direct-to-consumer market, in accordance with an interview that Sarah Lyons, HBO Max’s head of product expertise, gave Protocol. The community needed to construct an viewers first, after which repair the app’s flaws because the service scaled up.

While Lyons admits that the early days of HBO Max have been rocky, she thinks the corporate made the suitable resolution. We’ve been altering out the engine of the aircraft whereas we’re flying the aircraft,” she stated. “I do think it was the right decision to try to balance both,” stated Lyons.

HBO Max first launched its app in May 2020, to hitch an already saturated streaming ecosystem that included Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Apple TV+ and others. At the time, each HBO Go (the community’s on-demand app for cable subscribers) and HBO Now (the standalone app for cord-cutters) have been nonetheless obtainable, a proven fact that confused many subscribers. The community has since retired each apps.

Viewers have flocked to Reddit for the reason that app’s preliminary launch with complaints that spanned platforms and units. “We’ve been trying to watch the Harry Potter movies and literally every 15 min or so we get an ERROR message and have to force close the app. Another time it froze completely. It’s absolute garbage. I don’t have this problem with any other app or streaming service,” wrote one person in a thread on the r/HBOMax subreddit from January 2021 entitled “Why does this app suck so hard?”

For many viewers long-accustomed to superior suggestion algorithms on Netflix and different streaming platforms, it was laborious to get used to HBO Max’s lack of discoverability options. Lyons admitted that HBO Max wasn’t constructed with discovery in thoughts, and the app tried to deal with this by placing each new present on the app’s residence web page. “You didn’t have to go find anything, because whatever [show] you were looking for was going to be at the top of the home page,” stated Lyons.

While Engadget’s early evaluate of HBO Max detailed its flaws, we identified that it was nonetheless a “smart bet” for the corporate. Since then, the service has made many enhancements, together with a brand new Apple TV app and updates to its apps for Roku, Playstation, Android TV and others. But following a current $43 billion merger with Discovery, the most important change is but to come back. The plan is to merge each Discovery Plus and HBO Max into one unified platform.

HBO Max ended 2021 with 43.8 million subscribers, when mixed with the community’s cable subscribers of HBO who even have entry to the streaming service. It’ll quickly take in no less than one other 22 million subscribers from Discovery Plus. While there could possibly be extra bumps down the highway, viewers can no less than be assured that HBO Max has extra expertise underneath its belt now.