I've talked on here about how much I liked HBO Max, so now that it's switched to Max, to accommodate all the Discovery content that came with that merger, I thought I'd do a quick post on first impressions. I've been thinking about this since the switch occurred on 23 May, but I saw a review on CNET today and decided to add my own two cents.
The first thing I noticed was that the menu along the side was stripped down, compared to HBO Max. It currently has only Search, Home and My Stuff, where before you could use that to get to the various content hubs (HBO, DC, Studio Ghibli, Adult Swim, etc). You could also get to the Browse section, where you could select movies, TV shows, and look at all the things that have just been added, as well as everything that was leaving soon.
Although not "everything", because in the lead up to this merger, HBO got rid of a lot of shows without announcing it ahead of time (admittedly, it's because nobody was watching them, but it was annoying to see a couple of things disappear from my list without warning). Still, for the stuff that they did say was leaving, it was nice to be able to check that section and decide if there were any movies I wanted to watch before they went.
That "leaving soon" section has now been moved to New & Notable, for some reason. It's way far down, and it doesn't show the date when each of those movies leaves, so I don't know how long I have to watch them. I guess the issue is that there's so much on Max (as there was on HBO Max), that it's hard to decide on the actual thing I want to watch. When I knew something was leaving, it was easy to prioritize that, even if in most cases it came back a month or two later. Or to put it another way, discovery of new content is more difficult than before, which is ironic for a service part owned by the Discovery Channel.
(In case you're wondering, I wrote this blog post just so I could use that line)
To illustrate how bad discovery is on Max, I didn't even know about the Last Chance section until I read this Tom's Guide review, midway through writing this post. It's not particularly intuitive to put "Leaving Soon" in the "New & Notable" section, is it? Especially if you put it way down the rows, so that someone who doesn't know it's there doesn't bother to scroll that far down.
Also, as a quick note on the name, it still feels odd that WarnerDiscovery took HBO out of the app's name. HBO is synonymous with good shows and movies, and has been for essentially my whole lifetime, so it seems like an own goal to deliberately weaken your app's branding. But then, part of what makes HBO, the brand, so impressive is that it's continued to have so much good content despite being hamstrung by a series of terrible owners, going back to the AOL-Time Warner days and right through the time when it was owned by AT&T, of all people.
But let's talk about some positives, because they do exist. The first one is that the massive amount of content I actually might want to watch is mostly still there. It still has all the HBO, DC and Adult Swim stuff I've been checking out, plus a few other shows and a lot of standup comedy. This is the thing that makes HBO Max/Max the best streamer overall for me: Disney Plus has a lot of good, Francis-approved content, and Paramount Plus is essentially a way for me to subscribe to Star Trek (plus Champions League), but HBO's diversity of content makes it the king, and the reason why most of the movies I've watched this year have been on there.
I'm not too bothered by the Discovery content, but one positive I've noticed is that now almost all of the CNN shows are back. Where before HBO Max only had season 1 of Parts Unknown, for example, it now has all 12 seasons, minus a couple of episodes that were pulled due to the circumstances surrounding Anthony Bourdain's death. They've also put on Stanley Tucci's Searching for Italy, which is good on the one hand, but sad because CNN cancelled it after season 2.
The other positive is that, compared with HBO Max, the new Max is significantly less buggy. The CNET review claims the user experience is still glitchy, but so far the only thing I've found is that one comedy special I've been watching bit by bit hasn't been added to my "Continue Watching" section. When I watched the second Shazam movie (and I've got thoughts, but I'll address those another time), that showed up in "Continue Watching", so this might be a one-off.
HBO Max, by contrast, had something go wrong literally every day. Whenever I'd start the app, its loading would cause a lag between pressing the action button on my remote and it actually starting the show. This lag meant either that it didn't register the button-push, or it did, but on the wrong show. The other infuriating thing was how I'd finish a movie, and be taken to its page, but when I'd press "back", it would start the movie again. I'm happy to report that these problems have disappeared from Max, as have random freakouts like the time I tried watching Superman II but the audio consisted of a high-pitched, constant beep.
To sum up, the new Max app is still probably the best streamer overall. It has the best selection of movies and TV shows of any streamer, and has been bolstered by all the Discovery shows, if that's your bag. Fingers crossed, it's sorted out the bugs that plagued HBO Max, so that things don't randomly autoplay when you've tried to quit out of them. Finding stuff to watch has gotten a little bit more confusing, but that seems to be more because of how they organize those sections, rather than completely eliminating sections like "Last Chance". Hopefully they'll make that navigation simpler and more in line with the old version, but at least it's all still there in some form.
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