The WarnerMedia exec tells me some of the trouble can be traced to bugs that cropped up as part of the June launch of a new $10 ad-supported tier and, just a few weeks later, the expansion into 39 new countries and territories. Integrating commercials into what had previously been an ad-free platform meant introducing a whole new layer of coding into the app, thus increasing the potential for technical hobgoblins to sneak in and make mischief. He also admits that, in this case at least, it’s not just a matter of People Whining on Twitter. “We see the crash logs,” he says. “We’re not blind to it.” As for Roku users, the company put out a statement at the end of July admitting the “experience on Roku devices isn’t at the quality level we want and our users expect” and promising the platform was “hard at work on resolving these issues.”įixing the problems is taking time, however, and a senior WarnerMedia exec tells me the social-media commentary surrounding the Max app’s summer snafus has been “super painful” to take in. The biggest problems with the Apple interface were addressed within weeks, and a company source tells me the remaining errors should be corrected within days. Quite the contrary: They’re well aware of the issues plaguing the user experience and have been scrambling to fix things.
![nbc app playstation nbc app playstation](https://thestreamable.com/media/pages/live-tv-streaming/playstation-vue/d0ea0f97d6-1576040059/playstation-vue-1536x864-crop.jpg)
HBO Max execs don’t actually hate their customers, of course. Added another, “I tried to rewind a show on HBO Max and now I am being tried at the Hague.” One frustrated consumer was brutally blunt: “HBO Max bravely answers the question, ‘What if the people who designed an app fucking hated their customers’.” Over 160,000 users have liked the tweet within the past week.
NBC APP PLAYSTATION TV
“Attempted to rewind on the HBO Max app and my TV started smoking and shaking then fell off the wall,” one user wrote last week, generating nearly 11,000 retweets. There hasn’t been some sort of cataclysmic failure of the Max app - not even close to it. And yet, these issues have become widely felt, so much so that they’ve even turned into memes on Twitter. I noticed the Apple TV captioning glitch a few weeks ago, but Max is working just fine on my Roku. To be clear, not every operating system has been affected by these bugs, and even within various classes of devices, the level of pain can vary. ➽ Not all customers have been so lucky: Roku users have borne the brunt of the Max malfunctions. In addition to overall slowness and occasional freezes, many are still experiencing repeated crashes when trying to play content on the app, often rendering it virtually unusable - or at the very least incredibly annoying. Thankfully, this problem appears to have been fixed. The Max app wouldn’t remember their settings, which meant folks needed to turn these features on or off each time they returned to the app. ➽ Apple TV users this summer also had to deal with a problem surrounding subtitles, closed captioning, and audio description. While that bug was squashed for most users relatively quickly, HBO Max insiders acknowledge that issues with playback control and scrubbing are still popping up for some folks when they watch titles with longer run times, including movies. ➽ Back in June, some subscribers who accessed Max via Apple TV’s high-end streaming devices found it almost impossible to fast-forward or rewind programs. The good news, Buffering has learned, is that a major fix is in the works.įirst, though, let’s dive into the issues troubling the platform, which range from tiny glitches to near-apocalyptic failures:
![nbc app playstation nbc app playstation](https://gadgetswright.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/NBCsports-activate.png)
But much as the glitzy exterior at The White Lotus hides some ugly truths, the platform’s strong overall performance has masked a major issue: For a not-insignificant number of customers, actually using the Max app over the past few months has become an experience scarier than a Tony Soprano nightmare. HBO Max execs have had plenty of reasons to celebrate this summer, from an impressive showing in the Emmy nominations and rapid subscriber growth to its first-ever expansion into countries outside the United States.