What Technology Changes Does Max Have Over HBO Max? How Do Behind-the-Scenes Improvements Impact Video, Buffering?
Warner Bros. Discovery executives — most of whom came from the Discovery side of the merged company — have not been shy about their criticisms of the technology that powered the now-sunset HBO Max streaming service. As WBD began to ramp up its efforts to launch its new and improved streamer known as Max, the execs talked up how the new platform would be better constructed to provide a far better user experience to customers.
“We have a platform that’s not particularly good,” company CEO David Zaslav said last November about HBO Max. “We’ll be emerging with a new platform that we think is going to be much better and much more user-friendly.”
While Max visually looks very similar to its predecessor, it has been completely rebuilt from the ground up in order to provide more consistent and stable performance across all devices. One of the express goals of the new platform is to simplify the navigation and make it easier for viewers to find what it is they are looking for; cutting down on the number of clicks needed in order to get their episode or movie playing. Minimizing the complexity of the platform was something that the engineering team working on Max needed to focus on as the number of shows and movies on the service has grown significantly with the combination of all of HBO Max’s titles with the vast majority of discovery+’s.
To make sure that the new service functioned as efficiently as possible, the team in charge of building Max brought together designers and engineers from both of the company’s legacy services in order to figure out what the disparate streamers were (and were not) doing well.
“When we sat down with the team to really think about Max, and then of the future technology platform going forward,” WBD’s chief product officer Tyler Whitworth told The Streamable on Monday, “we really wanted to start off with just making sure we do the basics better. [To] make sure when customers are browsing, when they’re streaming, when they’re downloading content to watch offline, that they can have trust that it works [and] it works well, [that] they’re getting premium video, premium audio each and every time they use the service.”
Related: What's the Difference Between HBO Max and Newly Launched Max? An In-Depth Look at New Streaming Service
Though Max maintains much of how HBO Max looked, there are a number of important changes specifically tied to content discovery that WBD hopes that viewers will appreciate. However, there are even more improvements that the tech teams have made behind the scenes.
The goal of these changes was to ensure that the engineers could “move fast, be nimble, and meet the needs of our customers” according to Whitworth. These changes include everything from how WBD is able to update the price of the service and introduce deals and specials to how content gets delivered to the app around the world via various pipelines to how teams can employ experiments on different parts of the product.
One of the major behind-the-scenes changes that Warner Bros. Discovery made with Max is how it handles customers’ payments. Last month, WBD’s global streaming head J.B. Perrette revealed that over half of the customers that HBO Max loses were “involuntary,” meaning that their subscriptions were canceled because of a billing issue, whether that was an expired card, insufficient funds, or a temporary glitch.
Obviously losing that many customers who didn’t actively choose to leave the service is not ideal when trying to pull a streaming service into profitability. So, the teams behind Max have put into place a two-pronged approach to meet customers where they are and give them every opportunity to remain subscribed. The first tactic that Max will employ is to better communicate billing issues to customers across all devices.
“We made a number of improvements, just being more proactive in our communication to our customers,” Whitworth said. “Not just the traditional means, such as email, but actually in the app itself [but also] on their mobile device, their tablets, even their televisions.”
That extra communication is being done in support of additional steps to keep a customer from churning on the back end. In the past, once a payment didn’t go through, a subscription would expire whenever the period that had already been paid ended. However, now, Max will retest the stored payment information on a handful of other opportunities in order to check if the issue has been resolved.
“If you give customers a little bit of grace in that,” Whitworth said, “that’s an improvement that customers don’t see. But, we really thought it had to be a combination of both proactively and transparently communicating to our customers and [so] they understand what the issue is and how they can easily resolve it, but also doing things on the back end to give them kind of more opportunities for it to go through.”
Another major pain point for consumers that Max is trying to remedy is disruptions in service. Last fall, WBD’s chief technology officer for streaming Avi Saxena explained to The Streamable the six-month process that his teams went through to prepare HBO Max for the premiere of “House of the Dragon.” Some of the lessons learned from that experience can also be found in how Max will move forward.
According to Whitworth, WBD no longer needs to estimate how many people will tune into the service at a certain time in order to be able to have enough server power to provide smooth and responsive playback. Instead, the technology stack will be responsive, adding more server space as viewership increases, thus dramatically lowering the chances that Max will crash when a major series premiere or finale debuts. With Emmy-winning series “Succession” wrapping up its four-season run on Sunday, May 28, this will be put to the test quickly.
Another adjustment that WBD made for the launch of Max was in how the company built the different versions of the app that will appear across the streaming landscape.
“In the applications that we built, we used a lot more native technology to each of the different platforms,” Whitworth said. “So how Apple, Roku, or others prefer their apps to be built so that the apps work more seamlessly on each of those platforms, that was another improvement.”
Related: Everything You Need to Know About Max
In order to make sure that the service is living up to expectations, the Max teams monitor a number of key metrics across the experience and review them on a weekly basis. Whitworth said that not only do they want to improve upon the streaming experience that customers had on HBO Max, but they also want to make streaming on Max the benchmark across the entire streaming industry.
“Over time, we always evaluate those and we try to raise the bar and improve on those from there,” he told The Streamable. “So there are things that do evolve a bit over time. Generally, though, we are shooting for improved performance off HBO Max, but really won’t be content there. We’ll be wanting to improve even further and make it as absolutely seamless as possible for customers.”
According to WBD, new updates will come to Max every few weeks, with the first starting as earlier as mid-June. These improvements will be centered on customer feedback and will prioritize the new features and fixes that matter most to users.
Max
Max is a subscription video streaming service that gives access to the full HBO library, along with exclusive Max Originals. There are hubs for content from TLC, HGTV, Food Network, Discovery, TCM, Cartoon Network, Travel Channel, ID, and more. Watch hit series like “The Last of Us,” “House of the Dragon,” “Succession,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and more. Thanks to the B/R Sports add-on, users can watch NBA, MLB, NHL, March Madness, and NASCAR events.