HBO Max Is Officially Just Max, And The Rebranding Has Somehow Broken The Whole Service
It's been a somewhat less-than-ideal week for Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. Barely 48 hours after delivering a commencement speech to Boston University students and getting soundly booed and heckled from beginning to end, inadvertently becoming the public face and main villain of the ongoing writers' strike, the widely-heralded rebranding effort to change the streaming service formerly known as HBO Max into just "Max" has gotten off to a rough start. And I'm not just talking about the awfully generic new name!
After weeks of breathless marketing and constant ads signaling the big makeover, many HBO Max subscribers in the US woke up Tuesday morning to discover some significant login issues that have marred the grand relaunch. As reported by Variety and confirmed firsthand by yours truly (along with an avalanche of annoyed subscribers on social media), users across the desktop website as well as mobile apps have experienced technical glitches preventing them from actually logging in to the new Max streaming service. When prompted to log in again using previous HBO Max credentials, the sign-in screen takes users to a welcome page urging them to click on a "Start Streaming" button to begin ... though many have reported being unable to progress past this point at all, leaving them stuck.
On one hand, this is no different than several high-profile disruptions to streaming services in years past, such as the traffic overload when Disney+ first launched or the familiar trend of streaming services crashing just before (or during) season finales of major shows. After all, importing every subscriber from the old HBO Max app/website to the new one for Max isn't a simple flip of the switch. But it's difficult to overlook the optics of what many consider to be an egregious mishandling of IP and branding.
Max(imum headaches)
Please send thoughts and prayers to whichever poor social media manager is currently in charge of the official "Max Help" Twitter account, folks. Users have taken to social media in droves to complain about the wholesale rebranding gone wrong — an outcome that has felt inevitable ever since word first dropped that the clunky but familiar name of "HBO Max" would be rebranded into a new service combining that and Discovery+ now titled "Max." To be fair, as much as dropping the prestigious name of "HBO" would seem like a grave miscalculation, our own Ryan Scott previously wrote about why this move made perfect business and branding sense ... although that doesn't exactly excuse the interesting choice to just stick with "Max."
In any event, Variety reports that Warner Bros. Discovery is aware of the issues that have cropped up, describing them as only "minor." Here's what a spokesperson had to say about this morning's technical snafus:
"You must always anticipate issues on a tech rollout of this scale. We can share that only minor ones have emerged and were quickly remedied."
Subscribers still left out in the cold at the time of this writing can likely expect these issues to be resolved in a matter of hours, but there's certainly no getting around the negative attention swirling around this rebranding effort and particularly David Zaslav's handling of Warner Bros. Discovery overall. Despite promises of adding a wealth of shiny new 4K streaming options to Max, it shouldn't be forgotten that this only comes on the heels of the company removing dozens upon dozens of streaming-only movies and shows along with a wealth of other titles, particularly in animation.
It appears that Warner Bros. Discovery's streaming struggles aren't quite in the rearview mirror just yet.