According to a new report from Variety, some important updates and improvements are coming to the tvOS HBO Max app on the Apple TV HD and Apple TV 4K.
Over the duration of the app being on the Apple TV, users have complained about issues regarding the functionality and stability of the app.
The good news is WarnerMedia will be releasing a new version of the app that will roll out this week and throughout next week. The new version on the app is built on “its next-generation platform” and will provide better performance and stability than the current version.
Other aspects of the app that will be updated are its sign-in feature. With the new update, it is planned for the app to have an easier way for users to sign in and sign up for HBO Max. Additionally, users will have the ability to skip credits of TV shows or movies they are streaming and to have a home page with a “hero” banner that can be scrolled through.
The “My Stuff” area of the app is said to be seeing some changes as well. It is said to include ways for users to easily manage what they have been watching lately and plan to stream in the future, and methods for sorting and editing that list.
Sarah Lyons, direct-to-consumer global product management at WarnerMedia, said developing the HBO Max app has been a multi-year journey.
“We made a deliberate decision to use the [existing] HBO Go and HBO Now apps,” she said. “But we knew that original platform was not designed for a big content catalog or international distribution. We knew we would have to replatform it later.”
Lyons also spoke with The Streamable regarding this new Apple TV app and the impact it will have on those users.
“The biggest thing we’re conscious of is Apple users are very used to that ecosystem and how that ecosystem behaves,” she said. “The way that they scrub on the remote is really important to them, and candidly, we had not had some good scrubbing experiences in the past … So that’s one we were very conscious of trying to make sure that the scrubbing and swiping of the remote works well…We’re trying to respect the Apple community and how they’re used to engaging, which is a little different than other platforms. So we’ve tried to take a tailored approach to each platform and address the things that matter to those users.”
Lyons said the changes to the app are ones that have been curated from customer feedback.
“This is really meant to shore up the customer experience,” she said. “We’ve been listening and combing through every single customer comment we see on social or in our customer call centers to make sure we’ve identified every pain point they have and all this replatforming is meant to just kind of knock off the list all the things that we’ve seen in all the complaints that customers have and, month by month, improve and get better and get better and get better.”
HBO Max currently costs $9.99 a month for its ad-supported tier and $14.99 a month for its ad-free version. It is available to stream on the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Apple TV and Mac. You can read our review of the streaming service too.
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