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Comment by nayroclade | Hacker News Reader

Apparently they didn't forget. Lionsgate did all the necessary work, then someone sent the "wrong file" to HBO Max, and it seems nobody checked it properly before uploading it!

Given the volume of material these streamers are handling, I expect QA is minimal. I remember when I was watching Frasier on Amazon Prime, a bunch of the episodes had been configured to play in the wrong aspect ratio. Clearly nobody had ever bothered to check them.

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When I worked in the VOD industry we never almost never did a precheck of the files. The content provider (Lionsgate in this case) would upload the files that would then get ingested by the CMS system for normalization and transcoding. The most check the distributor did was add metadata marks for ad breaks and random checks for transcode quality.

I set up custom ingest workflows many cable companies around the world and they all worked the same. You just had to trust that the providers sent you good copies and get them to fix their shit if it was wrong. Most of the time it was bad metadata (episode description, ect).

Friends on Netflix one day years ago had the extended versions of the episodes. They fixed it quickly, but it's kind of a shame since it'd be nice if we had the choice to select which version we wanted to see.

I’ve seen movies on Prime where the audio was very badly out of sync. I thought it was my setup at first, but I was able to isolate it to particular titles. Like watching a bad dub from another language.

> Given the volume of material these streamers are handling, I expect QA is minimal

Yeah, I expect QA is minimal for these shows that are past their prime. Only fans will really watch them again, it's probably not worth it to spend the extra time to review every single episode. (But of course, fans will care! I'm just saying it's probably not worthwhile for HBO to check)

HBO Max was advertising this as a big new exciting release. They probably paid a bunch of money for exclusive streaming rights and expected to capture a new audience that missed the show the first time.

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