I wonder if that commenter meant HBO Go? HBO tech has had an interesting history.

First came HBO Go. This was the online streaming for those with HBO as part of a standard cable package. Apparently it was built on a .Net stack and had huge problems.

HBO Now is the service created for standalone sales of streaming. Apparently it had a completely different tech stack because of issues with HBO Go. Apparently it came from the same people who did the streaming services for MLB (Major League Baseball)> In my experience it was very good.

HBO Max is the expanded and updated content ecosystem that came with the merger. I don't know what the tech stack here is. I suspect it's just incremental changes to HBO Now but that's just a guess.

Perhaps the commenter was referring to HBO Go's problems as evidence that serving VODs isn't "solved". To clarify, I mean "solved for Netflix".

The UI of HBO Max on an Apple TV is entirely befitting of AT&T - it makes me want to watch anything else because of how bad scrolling is because they insist on using their own crapware instead of the platform-native software.

Warner Bros and therefore HBO Max bought a company called You.i that built their own React Native Rendering engine for low end OTT devices I don't know if they use that engine for mobile or the native RN engines.

Last I heard their whole ecosystem is now based on this.

But if there's scrolling issues and some others, its likely because they're literally trying to run one codebase across everything including OTT devices.

https://www.youi.tv/

Chalk up DirectTV NOW/ATT TV/DirectTV Stream (all the same product) as a victim of that too. Scroll interactions take multiple seconds to register, click activates elements other than the one indicated as selected by the UI, just an overall shitshow.

But they’re the only OTT streamer that carries the Lakers and Dodgers channels, so alas…

Oh, if only I could outright kill all sports channels and sports content.

Or at least permanently hide all sports-related content on all devices I own.

I pay for the Hulu+/Disney+ combo that does not include ESPN, because I don’t want to pay for ESPN. Even if that triple combo was cheaper, I’d still pay for the combo that doesn’t include ESPN.

HBO Max performance seems to be platform/tv dependent. It works fine on my Ipad but is absolutely dreadful on my Samsung televisions. Super slow and crashes every single time when viewing content that is 30+ minutes.

This is the marketing equivalent of a leaky abstraction.

HBO Max, continuous crashes, recommendation algorithm, massive latency even above the fold, I've learned the failure modes and I know how to fix this.

This in on a modern Roku TV, released 8 months ago. 0 problems like this from Netflix.