HBO Max drops Linux support in all browsers? | Hacker News Reader

HBO Max drops Linux support in all browsers?

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71 pointsmaple3142110 comments

What’s funny is that I’m certain that the vast majority of Linux users who were paying for this were trying really hard to watch these shows legitimately, and almost all of them will be antagonised by this and just download torrents or similar.

It increasingly seems to be only valve who understand that piracy occurs because of friction rather than price (for media like games and TV at least).

I pirate quite a lot of games but if they're good I'm more than happy to buy it so I get multiplayer and cloud saves etc.

Pirating games seems like a terrible deal when you consider the viruses, bot nets and bitcoin mining malware.

Those problems are almost nonexistent if you get past the public torrent sites. Lots and lots of impostor sites and users though, I assume most of it automated.

The bitcoin mining problem is seeping into even free-to-play game markets, which I have mixed feelings about. On one hand, it's at least better than the corrosive influence of advertising.

If you've ever contracted malware in any shape through piracy, you've been doing it wrong. Public torrent trackers are fine. The existence of various Scene indexing sites [0] allows you to verify a release before you download it.

[0]: Like https://predb.me/ or https://www.xrel.to/releases.html

Only if you don't know what you're doing.

There is this thing called the scene and verification files.

Sadly enough, steam games have begun to pull out Mac support (Apple deprecated major API) soon after games started porting to Mac.

Even Steam cannot get games to support a platform, if the platform doesn't help it.

Along the same line I went back to pirating after all the companies started pulling their stuff off Netflix in favor of standing up their own services. I tried. But fine have it your way, back to getting none of my money.

How are you in the "right" here ? You're stealing a product and acting as if it's cool.

I didn't say I was in the right, nor do I think I'm cool. It's just reality that when artificial roadblocks make something more difficult than it should be people find a way around them.

Copying isn't stealing. Without Linux support I wouldn't buy the product anyway.

Odd for a big company like HBO to throw away hundreds of dollars of revenue just like that

What happens when Linux users tell their Windows/Mac friends "Hey, I've got all of $SHOW downloaded, want it?".

Nobody does that anymore. It's "Hey, I got $SHOW on my plex server, want an invite?"

True that.

It's almost time for Plex to die, then.

What's the new hotness, is Emby dope yet?

There is a free fork of Emby called Jellyfin that has replaced Plex for me.

https://jellyfin.org/

Pretty sure it cost them more to keep the service up for linuxes than they got from the people using it.

But... why? What is the cost here?

Developer hours (and SRE + admin hours!) to maintain.

I'm not understanding. Why is the OS a concern of this browser-based streaming application?

I don't know anything about cross-platform support, so clearly I'm missing something. Is it cross-platform DRM? I'm admittedly ignorant about this stuff.

Were they charging Linux users less? I imagine that there is an order of magnitude more MacOS users compared to Linux. How many users does it take to break even with streaming?

What’s also funny is that if they just use the right abstraction layers developing for Linux shouldn’t be much more effort than for Mac

They already are, it's the browser…

Mac is one platform. Linux is tens of different operating systems.

If only there were some kind of platform agnostic hypertext language that could be used here so that vendors didn't need to care about the details of the user's operating system.

I can hardly get web developers to test on another browser than Chrome, I can't imagine what it will take to get them to test on another OS.

My point was that it shouldn't matter which user agent you use; they should all implement the standards.

If none of the web devs at a big company like HBO use Linux as their daily driver (at least at home), I’d be very surprised...

This is likely intentional user-agent filtering rather than any browser feature support issue. Linux is a first class platform for Chrome. Chase (the bank) does something similar.

The HBO Max saga is really tiresome. They really want you to think of Amazon and Roku as the bad guys, but they really, really aren’t.

HBO threw so many loyal customers under the bus by not having Prime Video channels or Roku devices as supported options at launch.

If you have been a loyal, full paying customer of HBO via Prime for years, suddenly you’re a second class customer paying the same price as Max, but without access to the expanded content. Even if you were willing to migrate that engagement to HBO’s preferred Max app, if you happen to have set up your home to rely on Roku devices, you are out of luck. It’s crazy town.

Apparently HBO expects customers to just wholesale switch their preferred home device setup that is working well for use of Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, Disney+, ESPN, Showtime, etc. etc. just for the Max app. Crazy.

I really hope the pressure ratchets up on them as nobody moves to Max as the early numbers have shown.

HBO is a channel. It is not a competitor of Netflix or Hulu, and its whole value proposition of producing significantly higher quality original content rests on this. It should want to be a channel and not a platform.

The whole strategy is rotten, and the tactical execution of Max is something really HBO should be ashamed of. What a way to damage customer loyalty.

Just get a device that supports HBO Max?

I’m pissed they don’t support OS/2 but I can view HBO Max on my iPad instead.

It’s deeply unrealistic to expect customers to change their viewing habits and buy new devices for this. People rely on the supported devices to stay stable over time because they may set up larger aspects of their home entertainment systems to rely on one device in a way that’s not cheap or easy to switch.

People using Roku devices to watch HBO on a large television are not going to switch to a tablet or phone. Many of those people don’t have a smart TV with built in apps, nor any interest to pay the price for a video game system like PS4, nor the ability to switch everything to Apple TV (which frankly doesn’t work as well as Amazon Fire or Roku, just my opinion). And the costs for new devices are totally not justifiable if the only reason is one minor streaming app. Everything _but_ HBO Max works great on my Roku - that sounds like an HBO problem.

“Just get another device” absolutely is not a feasible solution for most customers affected by this. As the numbers have shown, the vast majority of HBO’s ~36 million subscribers are not moving to Max, and are more likely to switch back to HBO on a linear cable subscription than switch platforms just for one minor app. If a few people were complaining, it would be their problem to deal with the device change. If 33 million people are complaining and ignoring HBO Max, it’s HBO’s problem.

To boot, even if today the issue is with HBO Max not supporting Amazon Prime Video channels or Roku, they are just teaching customers to be wary - tomorrow it could be that they don’t like the deal from Apple TV or Playstation, and they are setting a disturbing precedent of throwing customers under the bus when that happens.

> It’s deeply unrealistic to expect customers to change their viewing habits and buy new devices for this.... People using Roku devices to watch HBO on a large television are not going to switch to a tablet or phone.

How do you know this? are there any statistics on this? Are you going to bring your Roku TV on the tube on the way to work? You can use your phone to watch HBO Max. I had no problem switching between my laptop and my iPad, I just did it today?

> “Just get another device” absolutely is not a feasible solution for most customers affected by this.

Well, it solved my problem, what is yours? because I don't see yelling at HBO to support 4% of a userbase a productive use of my time. I normally see people watching their devices anywhere they please, it isn't like they are shackled to Linux are they?

I don’t know where you’re getting this 4% number. Together Roku & Amazon Fire account for about 70% of the US streaming market, 5 million subscribers to HBO do so through Amazon Prime Video channels (that’s about 15% of total HBO subscribers).

The customer base being affected is huge, and your comparison with Linux is totally off the mark.

Wait, HBO Max supported Linux?

To be honest this outcome is unsurprising, especially when users using Linux on the desktop (Not Android) accounts for less than 4% market share worldwide. [0]

[0] https://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.asp...

Losing 4% is quite a lot actually but probably the actual number of people that watch HBO on a Linux desktop is a lot lower than that.

Yeah, it’s the poorest 4%.

Nah, us Linux users make a decent buck making sure the lights stay on for the rest of you.

No, but many of these probably are professional workstations at workplaces, that people aren’t going to be using for entertainment.

This is how stupid companies are. Those 4% may not be a viable demographic of itself but by not supporting that 4% you explicitly tell them to pirate.

If the loss of revenue through piracy is less than the cost of ongoing Linux support, then this is a sensible business decision.

Making sure your website doesn't explode should have minimal cost.

4% of revenue at this scale, minus server costs, is an enormous amount of profit. Supporting one extra browser/OS combo should take less than one dev.

Does that mean HBO are giving Linux users a license to pirate because that's cheaper for HBO than supporting them? Where do I sign up?

What's beyond ridiculous is that I get HBO Max with my internet but I can't use it. Great...

Your phone has an app.

Awesome, I get to view these amazing high-budget shows on a crappy 6" screen.

Yep, you have no right to HBO, you only have the permission. If you are unsatisfied with your available options, I guess that's your problem not theirs.

The only sad thing here is that most people in the US don't have the possibility of choosing a different ISP/Cable provider because they are all monopolies.

I was just about to say lucky that I'm not living in a totalitarian military dictatorship like North Korea or the US and I can freely choose my service provider and that service provider doesn't just lease from a company which has a monopoly deal with the government.

Cast it to a TV screen or use a iPad or an Android tablet?

It's not a linux app, I don't think there's any native code involved, the reddit poster was just running it in Firefox.

It's likely this is either a Firefox/platform bug or some sort of mistaken platform whitelisting on the part of HBO. Or plausibly it's a non-mistaken attempt to blacklist Linux users, but that seems rather less likely.

But that 4% is very likely to be able to afford to pay for HBO and know how to easily pirate HBO content. HBO should want to make it as easy as possible for them to become paying customers.

Edit: Wording

I can't comment on this, but Linux support is becoming standard. Hey, Todoist, Evernote, and the list goes on.

Haha, spend millions on marketing but making a web app work in the _browser_ independently of OS is too expensive.

> Title: HBO Max drops Linux support in all browsers

Is there some acknowledgment that this is actually official, a statement from their support or anything? Or did they just push some change and not check that it actually runs on all the platforms their customers use?

Neither would surprise me but there's nothing in TFA which says either way.

I don't see any official announcement. In my browser's debug console, though, I see plenty of HTTP 400s from a POST to https://comet.api.hbo.com/drm/license/widevine?keygen=playre... with this as the response body: "Invalid License Request".

It would not surprise me if they've intentionally or not changed the supported licensing schemes and invalidated all Linux support without realizing it.

It looks like it got lost in crossposting, but the original thread includes statements from CS drones that Linux won't be supported anymore. Plus lots of customer reports in the parent posting.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HBOMAX/comments/i484wx/hbo_max_has_...

Not only did they drop linux support, they dropped support for paying customers via Amazon. I had been paying for HBO via Amazon Prime Channels to watch on my FireTV and also logging into HBO Now on my Nvidia Shield for 2+ years now. HBO just recently shut down HBO Now though and "upgraded" it to HBO Max, but does not allow Amazon users to log back in.

After trying to contact HBO Max and HBO Now they both refused to acknowledge the issue so I just canceled my subscription. The only option I would have to watch on both devices would be to sign back up to HBO Max directly instead of HBO via amazon, but I'm good. They lost me as their customer due to their squabble with Amazon.

I recently signed up to HBO and bought a Fire TV stick just to watch it - it took a month to arrive and by then they had dropped support. Very frustrating.

There is a workaround though - you can sideload an APK of HBO Max. So it works - it’s just Amazon preventing it from being in their App Store.

Probably what's happening here is that HBO is requiring Widevide level 1 DRM but desktop Linux only supports weaker Widevine level 3.

This is very likely the reason, unless it was unintentional.

Following some of the threads on Reddit seems to add evidence for this. HBO Max is not filtering on User Agent string. Instead, it seems to be checking the Widevine keys.

Still no Widevine crack/emulation after all the Intel CPU bugs?

From my understanding, it's relatively well known how to break Widevine L3, but nobody wants to release code (for obvious reasons). Widevine L1 is much better secured, as it's required to be implemented in hardware.

A webpage should not be making decisions based on the OS running the browser. The web is meant to be platform agnostic.

Honest question, does linux support HDCP or other protections they feel they may need? Or is that not even at the OS level and could this be the reason for the dropped support?

If HDCP requires any support at all from the GPU then I'm guessing it's hard to do, since GPU drivers other than Intel are usually garbage

What is it about Linux and/or GPUs that makes it so hard to write great graphics drivers for it?

Do the two just not inter-operate well?

It costs money, and the market share is not so big. It has nothing to do with inter-operation, as Intel has proved. People also say nvidia's driver is great except from the friction coming from nvidia's political decisions not to cooperate with the rest of Linux community.

It's not Nvidia's drivers being any good per se (some features are lacking, off the top of my head async reprojection for VR), just the hardware is strong enough to still perform well. With AMD the open source drivers are better than the proprietary ones and generally has an easier time with compatibility, but comes with its own host of issues (e.g. no Freesync over HDMI, no Freesync with >1 monitor if using xorg).

In days like these I'm glad I have chromebook (then again, I haven't checked if HBO's android app supports such devices). Then again, I wish this didn't happen...

I saw it myself. Fedora user, I've been using it for HBO Max for less than a month. Then POOF, it no longer works.

Really poor handling of the situation, IMHO. You just get a message about 'Not able to play this video now, try again later.' Finding tech support contact links isn't easy. Per Reddit, if you do get ahold of them, they just brush you off.

Overall a very poor user experience. Boo.

duse for 20 years thy never supportedit anyways and i never thought thy drpped it o begin with tey never supported it. i thinknyour mistaken ad you should have told them macos but maybe you meed to contact your vendor for support and ot the idiots with the mpeg

HBO Max also does not have apps for Roku and Amazon Fire devices. They like to make their supported clients feel exclusive.

There are many posts online on how to sideload the APK on Amazon Fire TV sticks, etc. Though I'm not personally looking forward to a future where I can't use a web browser but instead have to run iOS or Android apps on my laptop...

Tangentially related - I've just checked, luckily HBO GO still works (Fedora 31, Firefox 78.0.2).

Uh-oh. So, since they don't count me as a potential consumer of their content, does this mean I can just torrent all their stuff without repercussions?

It doesn't look that such action will result in some lost revenie, right?

I can't believe I have to say this to an adult, but:

No, that does not mean you can steal.

theft requires taking something from someone. in the case of media piracy, the license owner's property is not lost. This is not theft.

Yes... it is. You're not paying for the right to use something. That is theft of goods and services.

Do you have any court precedents to back that up?

Uh oh, you used the 'steal' word when referring to digital goods. A non-insignificant group of pirates don't consider downloading content to be 'theft.'

Your comment isn't obvious as to which side you're on, so I'll repeat the same thing just in case:

Not paying for the right to use something is theft of goods and services.

In which legislature? In all legislatures around the world?

Have you personally verified this fact or are you just stating an opinion as fact?

We don't consider brushing your teeth theft either by the way.

So, can you please elaborate what exactly I would be stealing? They willingly abandoned any revenue they could get from me by abandoning my platform.

You're not paying for the right to use something. That is theft of goods and services.

"Theft" implies that the victim loses something valuable to them. The more close analogy would be 'picking up someone decided to throw away'.

It isn’t like your ‘platform’ is a part of who you are. You could buy a device that they support.

Content creators/providers are legally allowed to restrict the platforms they support. For example, you have to watch some live sports through a cable tv subscription. There is no way to pay for it separately.

Does this suck? Sure, but cable companies pay enough money to make it worth all the lost customers (or at least that is what they are betting on)

You have no legal right to access content under your terms. Content creators have (nearly) complete control (there are some laws around what they can do, but requiring Linux support is not one of them)

So what? The law is easy to bypass and a very separate thing from morality.

I wonder if you would feel the same way if someone violated an open source license....

Can you explain how piracy is stealing?

Read all the other comments.

Your definition of "theft" is a bit too broad, don't you think?

Usually theft means that the original owner is deprived of goods - they can't use them, can't sell them, they simply don't the the original item. This is simply not the case for digital goods. HBO won't lose money when I download GOT, won't they?

If it was totally legal to pirate all content, why would anyone pay for it? And if no one pays for content, why would HBO finance its creation?

It is disingenuous to say piracy doesn’t cost anything to the content creators.

It is totally legal to pirate content where I live now, and where I've lived before. Still, I pay for video games on Steam or for Spotify. Hell I even buy music on Bandcamp. I do this because it's convenient and because I want to support creators.

However, when a creator goes out of their way to alienate me as a customer - by either dropping support for my platform, or by region-blocking - I happily put on my pirate hat and get what I want for free. There is no other viable choice for me.

Steam is successful not because piracy is illegal. It is successful because it made buying games more convenient than pirating it. It is far easier to click, pay, get content than torrenting stuff and finding correct cracks/keygens, etc.

I have bought a great deal of games I played in 1990s (pirated, of course - there simply did not exist a way to buy games legally in Russia at that time), just because I liked them back then.

Also, please stop calling copyright infringement 'piracy'. Piracy is a dangerous penal crime involving violence and an open theft of possessions. It has nothing to do with copying information.

[flagged]

The irony is that free software requires copyright enforcement as precondition. I mean, if a company takes a GPL'ed code, modifies it, and sells it to another willing party without following GPL's terms, what does the original author materially lose?

It is not the irony. The core idea of GPL is to fight proprietary software with its own weapon.

Also, I think that you misunderstand the GPL terms. The aggrieved party in this hypothetical case is not the original author, it is the buyer of this modified software, whose rights to four essential freedoms [1] would be violated. These violations have a very real material cost.

BTw, it is common for people to believe that GPL requires publishing source codes on the Internet. It is not so. The requirement is to provide the user of a program source codes, so he can exercise the guaranteed freedoms. You can do it in any suitable form, publishing code is just the most convenient way to do it, but not mandatory.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

Hence the clarification "willing party". A company "pirates" a GPL'd code, creates its own derivative version, slaps a sticker saying "This is proprietary code, if you want to see the source then go buy from somewhere else." Someone is willing to buy the product, they are both happy. Just like two internet users sharing copyrighted files.

People can be coerced (fooled, cheated, etc) into believing that they are 'willingly' abandon their rights. This hypothetical example isn't similar to the case we're discussing here in this thread.

What if I pay their subsciption and pirate the shows?

Indeed. Not stealing things for which one has capability to steal is considered morally wrong here.

That isn’t how the law works. You can still be a consumer if you buy a different device.

This is like saying, “since this show is on HBO, but I only subscribe to Netflix, it must be totally ok to pirate it”

They aren’t required By law to support all forms of consumption to maintain their copyright.

It might suck, and you can be mad at them, but it doesn’t give you any legal right to pirate.

It's still illegal. So make sure you don't get caught.

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