Warner Bros. Discovery says only “minor” issues arose on launch day and were quickly resolved
UPDATE: It’s the big launch day for Max from Warner Bros. Discovery – and the recently revamped streaming service ran into technical issues early on. The company said the issues were “minor” and were quickly resolved.
On Tuesday morning, subscribers took to social media to complain about problems connecting to Max, which replaces the three-year-old HBO Max service. As reported by users, the issues affected the Max.com website as well as mobile apps, including iOS and smart TV apps on Roku and Samsung TV.
Of course, migrating millions of customers to a new streaming platform is bound to pose problems. HBO Max’s May 23 conversion to Max only covers the US
“You should always anticipate the issues of a technology rollout of this magnitude,” a Warner Bros. spokesperson said. Discovery in a statement to Variety. “We can share that only minor issues emerged and were quickly fixed.”
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For the launch of Max, Warner Bros. Discovery is actively monitoring customer reports of technical “war rooms” issues in multiple locations, including Bellevue, Washington, New York and London. “The whole team is on standby,” said Avi Saxena, chief technical officer of Warner Bros. Discovery Variety in an interview on Monday.
According to outage monitoring service Downdetector, user issue reports for Max were above a normal range on Tuesday morning (compared to HBO Max’s historical average) but were still relatively low: at their peak, there were 440 user outage reports on the site as of 9:06 am ET, which is relatively low for a major service.
Some subscribers have reported trying to log into Max.com – only to get stuck on the screen after clicking the “Start Streaming” button. Another user tweeted that on Roku they could watch a show but the Max service would freeze if they skipped the recap.
“Although to its credit, the Max app is much faster as it crashes faster than ever before,” tweeted Marc Istook, morning news anchor at WFAA in Dallas.
According to the company, a “large portion” of HBO Max subscribers will have their apps automatically updated to Max while in some cases users will be prompted to download an updated Max app. The plan was for HBO Max subscribers to be able to log in with their existing username and password and have all of their preferences migrated to the new Max.
According to the company, Max is available on the same platforms as HBO Max, including: iOS (iPhone and iPad), Android, Amazon Fire TV and Fire Tablet, Android TV, Apple TV, Google Chromecast, LG Smart TV, Roku, Samsung TV , Vizio SmartCast TV, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One, and web browsers (including Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge for Windows, and Apple Safari).
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