HBO Max has added Shorts, a vertical scrolling feed of clips, trailers and bonus bits pulled from its own library, sitting behind its own icon on the bottom nav. It is tuned to your watch history, and if something grabs you mid-scroll you can jump into the full episode or drop it in My List without leaving the feed. Right now it is select iOS users in the US only. An in-house AI reads scene-level metadata across the catalogue to flag the big moments, but human editors still decide what makes the cut, which tells you plenty about how much they trust the first half of that sentence.
The reasoning is sound enough. People decide what to watch on TikTok and then open a streaming app to watch it, so the discovery is happening on someone else's platform. What bothers me is where this lands. The feed is on a phone. The subscription gets used on a television. Nothing about scrolling clips on a handset while the TV sits idle actually fixes the twenty minutes of scrolling the home screen that made everyone give up in the first place. And a feed built from memorable scenes is a feed built from spoilers, dressed up as promotion.
The other announcement is the one I would actually use. Ask HBO Max takes a plain sentence rather than keywords, so you can describe a mood or an occasion instead of guessing a title. That is a genuine improvement over the search boxes every one of these apps ships with. It launched on Android, US adults only, so nobody currently gets both features on the same device.
If your app added a scrollable clip feed tomorrow, would you ever open it, or is the search box the only bit you want fixed?
The reasoning is sound enough. People decide what to watch on TikTok and then open a streaming app to watch it, so the discovery is happening on someone else's platform. What bothers me is where this lands. The feed is on a phone. The subscription gets used on a television. Nothing about scrolling clips on a handset while the TV sits idle actually fixes the twenty minutes of scrolling the home screen that made everyone give up in the first place. And a feed built from memorable scenes is a feed built from spoilers, dressed up as promotion.
The other announcement is the one I would actually use. Ask HBO Max takes a plain sentence rather than keywords, so you can describe a mood or an occasion instead of guessing a title. That is a genuine improvement over the search boxes every one of these apps ships with. It launched on Android, US adults only, so nobody currently gets both features on the same device.
If your app added a scrollable clip feed tomorrow, would you ever open it, or is the search box the only bit you want fixed?
