Max Revamps Home Screen to Help Viewers Find Better Content Recommendations
Max Revamps Home Screen to Help Viewers Find Better Content Recommendations
Max subscribers will see fewer shows and movies they don’t have any interest in watching after the new update.
Max is barely a year old, but the engineers at Warner Bros. Discovery responsible for making it a hit with customers are continuing to work on the streamer. As part of those efforts, Max has been gradually rolling out a subtle, but important change to its homepage in recent months. According to Variety, Max’s home screen upgrade is meant to help lead viewers to content specifically recommended for them more quickly, allowing the streamer to improve engagement and reduce churn.
Key Details:
- Max’s new homepage reorders the vertical rail order and content tiles within rows for each individual user.
- The page also does a better job of suppressing content viewers have already seen or have had multiple opportunities to choose, but don’t.
- The rollout of the new Max home screen was completed at the end of July.
The new Max homepage layout should be available to all of the streamer’s customers now. Max began testing the redesign last December but has been rolling out the update to all subscribers since the end of July. The idea was to make Max’s home screen a smarter and more intuitive experience for customers. Each Max subscriber will see vertical tile rows ordered differently based on their preferences, and the titles embedded within each row are also arranged in a lineup specific to each viewer.
“We’re really leaning into title de-duplication so that we can improve the catalog exposure by removing repeat titles and balancing that also with watched content suppression,” WBD SVP of streaming global product Liesel Kipp told Variety.
What that means for viewers is that they’ll hopefully see fewer shows and movies in their tile rows that they don’t want to watch, or have already watched. The home screen update is intended to suppress shows and movies that subscribers have watched already, as well as titles that viewers have had multiple chances to watch and have repeatedly chosen not to.
Max calls this upgrade “Whole Page Optimization,” and it has already helped the streamer improve in four key areas: homepage efficiency — a term which means the frequency with which a home screen visit turns into a watching session; time watched in Max; number of return visits to the streamer; and diversity of content watched.
Why is Max Revamping its Home Screen?
Recent surveys show that Max is making a wise decision in upgrading its home screen to help viewers find new content more quickly. Antenna released data earlier this year that showed that Max had an above-average churn rate. So, boosting engagement by surfacing content that viewers want to watch is a great way to keep customers watching and to fight the cancelation rate.
Data from Accenture that was unveiled in April also helps to explain why Max thought this upgrade was important. It found that 54% of streaming viewers said that they spent six minutes or more trying to find something new to watch on a given platform, and the longer a customer browses for a new title without finding one that catches their interest, the more likely they are to decide to turn off their TV and pick a different activity.
Max isn’t the only streamer looking to upgrade its user experience. Netflix teased a major redesign of its home screen in early June, and customers should expect that upgrade to launch before the end of 2024.
All streamers have an eye on how to bring customers to recommended titles more quickly, as each knows that enhanced profitability requires more engagement from viewers. WBD reported net streaming profits of $103 million in 2023, and clearly wants to improve those numbers in 2024.
Max
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