I know folks who work at ATT. They have noticed (one if those “can’t help but notice” things) that the company intranet has yet to promote or crow about the “success” of HBO Max after launch. My brother has yet to make it work at his house.
Net: looks like it was a rush job Charlie Foxtrot. Over-priced, weak content (no Game of thrones) and beta code for the interface.
They deserve the failure if you ask me.
I don’t understand HBO Max either. We already had regular HBO through Comcast. I had to go through a signup process to connect to HBO Max, but that was just a minor nuisance. Our existing subscription covers it. I can’t really tell what the fuss was about. AT&T could have just made the TimeWarner movie and tv catalogue available through regular HBO and dispensed with all the fuss of rolling out a new platform that basically overlaps the old one. It looks to me like the marketing people created an artificial problem and made everyone jump through hoops to do something simple.