Inside HBO Max’s Scramble to Fix Its Glitchy App
By
Josef Adalian
This story first ran in Buffering, Vulture’s newsletter about the streaming industry. Head to
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Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo by HBO
HBO Max execs have had plenty of reasons to celebrate this summer, from an impressive showing in the
Emmy nominations and rapid
subscriber growth to its first-ever
expansion into countries outside the United States. But much as the glitzy exterior at
The White Lotus hides some ugly truths, the platform’s strong overall performance has masked a major issue: For a not-insignificant number of customers, actually using the Max app over the past few months has become an experience scarier than a
Tony Soprano nightmare. The good news, Buffering has learned, is that a major fix is in the works.
First, though, let’s dive into the issues troubling the platform, which range from tiny glitches to near-apocalyptic failures:
➽ Back in June, some subscribers who accessed Max via Apple TV’s high-end streaming devices found it almost impossible to fast-forward or rewind programs. While that bug was squashed for most users relatively quickly, HBO Max insiders acknowledge that issues with playback control and scrubbing are still popping up for some folks when they watch titles with longer run times, including movies.
➽ Apple TV users this summer also had to deal with a problem surrounding subtitles, closed captioning, and audio description. The Max app wouldn’t remember their settings, which meant folks needed to turn these features on or off each time they returned to the app. Thankfully, this problem appears to have been fixed.
➽ Not all customers have been so lucky: Roku users have borne the brunt of the Max malfunctions. In addition to overall slowness and occasional freezes, many are still experiencing repeated crashes when trying to play content on the app, often rendering it virtually unusable — or at the very least incredibly annoying.
To be clear, not every operating system has been affected by these bugs, and even within various classes of devices, the level of pain can vary. I noticed the Apple TV captioning glitch a few weeks ago, but Max is working just fine on my Roku. There hasn’t been some sort of cataclysmic failure of the Max app — not even close to it. And yet, these issues have become widely felt, so much so that they’ve even turned into
memes on
Twitter. “Attempted to rewind on the HBO Max app and my TV started smoking and shaking then fell off the wall,” one user
wrote last week, generating nearly 11,000 retweets. Added
another, “I tried to rewind a show on HBO Max and now I am being tried at the Hague.” One frustrated consumer was brutally blunt: “HBO Max bravely answers the question, ‘What if the people who designed an app fucking hated their customers’.” Over 160,000 users have liked
the tweet within the past week.
We see the crash logs. We’re not blind to it.
HBO Max execs don’t actually hate their customers, of course. Quite the contrary: They’re well aware of the issues plaguing the user experience and have been scrambling to fix things. The biggest problems with the Apple interface were addressed within weeks, and a company source tells me the remaining errors should be corrected within days. As for Roku users, the company put out a statement at the end of July admitting the “experience on Roku devices isn’t at the quality level we want and our users expect” and promising the platform was “hard at work on resolving these issues.”
Fixing the problems is taking time, however, and a senior WarnerMedia exec tells me the social-media commentary surrounding the Max app’s summer snafus has been “super painful” to take in. He also admits that, in this case at least, it’s not just a matter of People Whining on Twitter. “We see the crash logs,” he says. “We’re not blind to it.”
So What Went Wrong?
The WarnerMedia exec tells me some of the trouble can be traced to bugs that cropped up as part of the June launch of a new $10 ad-supported tier and, just a few weeks later, the expansion into 39 new countries and territories. Integrating commercials into what had previously been an ad-free platform meant introducing a whole new layer of coding into the app, thus increasing the potential for technical hobgoblins to sneak in and make mischief. Similarly, distributing Max programming to dozens of new, non-English-speaking markets also required tons of engineering bandwidth with the Herculean effort needed simply to add subtitles to thousands of hours of programming.
The largest issue is that Max has been running on a retrofitted version of the old HBO Go and HBO Now services.
However, the larger issue, according to HBO Max insiders, is that the current app wasn’t built from scratch the way Netflix or Hulu were brought to life. Instead, Max has been running on a retrofitted version of the old HBO Go and HBO Now services. While those were both solid applications, they were designed for a very different product. According to the WarnerMedia exec, the main concern of the engineers then was making sure everything didn’t crash when hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously streamed
Game of Thrones on a Sunday night. “That program was built for scale, and it was rock solid,” he says. HBO Max obviously still needs to handle a lot of traffic all at once, but it’s serving up substantially more content to a bigger audience — subscribers who are spread around the globe rather than living in just one country. Trying to do that on the existing platform has been a challenge from day one.
How They’re Fixing It
There is hope ahead, both for consumers and for the product-support staffers forced to answer all those angry tweets from frustrated users. Instead of simply rushing to plug holes in the existing infrastructure, HBO Max is getting ready to roll out a completely new app, one built from the ground up to match the needs of the current service. While it hasn’t been publicly announced yet, “We’re going to replace every single connected TV app in the next four or five months,” the WarnerMedia exec tells me. Woebegone Roku users will be first in line to get the new Max app along with PlayStation customers. Apple TV customers will likely have to wait until the end of the year, while an overhaul of the mobile and web-based apps is penciled in for early 2022.
Roku users will be first in line to get the new Max app; Apple TV customers will likely have to wait until the end of the year.
The upgraded Max app has been in the works for a while now, since at least late last year, which is when WarnerMedia acquired a company called You.i TV with an eye on revamping the guts of its app. While the new offering won’t look dramatically different for most users at first, “It will be wildly better than what’s out there,” the exec says. “It will just work better across the board.” Of course, the relaunch may result in a few
new bugs popping up in the short term — that’s common for any new product launch — but the exec says users will quickly see a much more stable experience. Eventually, once the basic mechanics of the app are fixed, the exec says the plan is to begin introducing more noticeable new features and evolutions, changes that will make for a more “sophisticated and cool and sexier” interface.
More Apps, More Problems
Having so many technical issues crop up in such a short time frame isn’t just a PR headache. Competition for subscribers and audience attention is so intense right now, the last thing any streamer wants is to anger customers with a poor user experience. Though, in fairness to HBO Max, it’s worth noting that technical demons have become a distressingly common occurrence in the streaming age. Every platform deals with criticisms over how its particular user interface functions.
For instance, while you
can rewind and fast-forward shows on the Peacock connected TV apps, I can report that the process is both painful and slow. Paramount+, meanwhile, somehow launched without giving users the basic ability to add shows to a content queue (it’s since been fixed). And despite purposely keeping its user interface incredibly simple, Disney+ famously imploded
on its first day back in 2019.
It’s also highly unlikely a substantial number of folks will cancel specifically because of a buggy app, even one with the level of
mishegoss as Max lately. But it’s not irrelevant, either. Sure, content is what drives subscriptions in the streaming wars, and
great programming will always be far more important than a perfect interface. Yet the reason Netflix has spared no expense trying to perfect its app is that it understands that a
constantly evolving product is a key tool in convincing members to stay put within its programming universe. You might not give up HBO Max because of issues with rewinding or too many crashes, but you may very well end up watching fewer titles or switching over to an app that runs more smoothly. So while the sort of buggery that has bedeviled Max of late isn’t going to be fatal, it sure doesn’t help with short-term momentum.
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Yeah i saw my hbo now was missing. It updated to HBO MAX last week.
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