HBO Max plans to roll out a new app in the next four or five months for connected TVs, built from the ground up, after complaints of glitches in its current app
This story first ran in Buffering, Vulture's newsletter about the streaming industry. Head to vulture.com/buffering and subscribe today!
Context & Ripple Effects
HBO Max's app problems trace back to a hurried birth: the service launched in May 2020 as a $15-per-month, 10,000-hour service assembled under AT&T's $4B streaming-war bet, and glitch complaints followed — including botched post-production edits in the 4K Mad Men re-release. A ground-up rebuild of the connected-TV app, promised within four to five months, is effectively an admission that the original client software never matched the content investment.
The stakes show in what came later: when Warner Bros. Discovery relaunched the service under the Max name in May 2023, the app layer had to carry both HBO and Discovery+ libraries — exactly the kind of load the 2020-era client was struggling with. App quality, not just catalog, became a retention issue for a service that has since raised prices across every plan.
First-order effects
- HBO Max's engineering organization shifts priorities to a from-scratch connected-TV rewrite, with existing subscribers on smart TVs and set-top boxes getting a replaced client inside roughly four to five months.
- Subscribers who filed the glitch complaints — including playback and metadata errors on titles like the Mad Men 4K release — are the direct beneficiaries if the new app ships on schedule.
Second-order effects
- With rivals competing on bundles and cross-service distribution deals, a reliable TV app becomes table stakes in HBO Max's negotiations: partners and bundle prospects judge the service partly on its client experience, so the rebuild protects deal value rather than just reviews.
- A successful rebuild sets a benchmark competitors must match — any streamer still shipping a patched-together legacy client on connected TVs faces sharper comparison once HBO Max resets expectations.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, streaming platforms treat front-end apps as core infrastructure with scheduled rebuild cycles rather than one-time launch artifacts — the Max rebrand shows the same client expected to absorb merged catalogs across corporate reorganizations.
- For device makers and platform owners, recurring app rewrites reinforce that the connected TV is the primary surface where subscriber satisfaction is won or lost, pushing streamers to invest in native TV engineering ahead of new features.
The trend: Streaming services are shifting from content-launch-first strategies to treating the connected-TV app itself as the durable competitive asset, rebuilt and rebranded as catalogs merge.