I am baffled as to why they had to launch an entirely new app rather than just rename the existing one. Could Apple have made them change the bundle ID? It's like they're putting in deliberate obstacles for existing subscribers.
Often new management wants to put their stamp on things. I've been in situations where we've had to do major redesigns because a new leader wanted to leave their mark. I've been in situations where each new leader wanted a new logo to mark that they made a difference - 3 logos in a decade.
Companies often squander resources in this kind of way. That's not to say that some redesigns and changes aren't warranted, but these things happen often. Why has Google launched a dozen chat apps? Why do some apps get a huge push followed by being abandoned followed by a huge rebranding/recoding push followed by being abandoned again? Many people on here have speculated it's because people get promoted for launching big new things and not for things that seem "easy" like maintenance.
You're rightly baffled from a logical standpoint. When you start thinking about the humans involved in the situation, their egos, their priorities for themselves which might not align with the company's, etc., then it potentially starts to make more sense.
I'm guessing there was some contractual thing (perhaps cable related) around the HBO name or else someone made a very poor choice.
The new CEO from the Discovery side of the merger cancelled a bunch of HBO Max programming that was doing well, because their background is in cheaper to produce reality content. It seems fated to join the very long list of bad media mergers.
I can understand canceling Close Enough and Infinity Train because they're too expensive, but I don't really understand what it's hurting for them to just say on the servers and continue to be streamable. Hard drive space is pretty cheap, especially at HBO's scale.
I've heard it's possibly a tax writeoff, but then I've seen conflicting reports claiming that that's not the case, so I have no idea. How much ongoing costs were involved with keeping the animated shows I like online?
That sort of management-by-spreadsheet without any of the humanity or long-term vision almost every corporation used to have seems to be an ongoing trend, especially in media, and it’s showing. Discovery, who have McDonnel-Douglassed HBO and are behind this mess, are a particularly good example of the kind of garbage heap that leadership style gets you.
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I call this "New Vice President Urination Syndrome." The stank gets on everything until they learn to use the bathroom.
To be fair, many of the other apps also suck. I think it may be because Apple allows TV apps to be written in JavaScript, and some of them are almost certainly poor ports of Web apps.
My pet peeve on the last version was having a carousel movie expand when you pause on it so that it moves things around and hides what you were looking at.
My pet peeve on the new one is a normal swipe on the remote blows through 80% of the carousel items instead of just one.
Neither annoy me as much as Amazon’s hijacking of the touch pad during video so that I can no longer tap the pad to see how far through the movie I am.
I get it, everyone wants their spin on things. But all I want is a usable, consistent experience. It drives me bonkers.
Surely that‘s among the worst things you can do from an SEO and customer retention perspectives?
A new app gives you a blank slate, which is easier than reverting old ratings.
I remember being nudged for repeated reviews by many apps, some explicitly listing that reason, before that was prohibited by Apple.
From news reports and interviews with the leaders involved, it appears that new guard wanted to have something new they could own and take credit for, and HBO was owned by the previous regime.
None of Discovery's marques were strong enough, and the $$ to get Discover as a brand into the right place was high.
So, least of all evils, given their problem: scrub HBO off the name, make it one of many brands in the app, and hope "Max" on its own, with some marketing, can expand to fill the gap.
If it works, Discover team takes credit. If not, Discover team blames holdovers from HBO days and says that this was just an intermediate step on the way to a brand new experience that will launch "real soon now".
Lots of problems with this approach, but business isn't always rational.
Subsequently having two separate codebase was probably considered preferable to development on one slowing to a crawl while it chased after two diverging requirements lists.
Hell, HBO Max became available in my country just last year, replacing HBO Go. And I know there used to be HBO Now in some places, so I guess we skipped that one. And no HBO is available in some of the places where you really expect it to be, like German speaking countries.
It's the most bafflingly stupid streaming service I ever had the displeasure of using.
I can see there's no improvement.
We can probably gleam many insights about the people who made the app (how it works, how big the bundle is, how fast/slow etc.). I haven't used the app so I can't make any judgements about the organization behind it.
It's also an idea older than Conway, presumably, although I don't know for sure.