HBO Max wants you to scroll.
The streamer is rolling out two new tools for mobile, and the first one is a vertical short-video feed called HBO Max Shorts. Trailers, clips and extra material from the service’s catalog, stacked one after another, swipe after swipe. If that sounds familiar, that’s the point.
The second is Ask HBO Max, an experimental search tool running on artificial intelligence.
Both are aimed at the same problem: people open the app, stare at a wall of tiles and close the app.
The feed does what feeds do
Shorts works the way the popular short-video platforms work. A continuous vertical feed, no destination, no menu to climb through. You keep swiping until something snags you.
The goal, per HBO Max, is discovery. Subscribers find something they’re interested in without hunting for it.
Whether that’s a better way to surface a prestige drama than, say, a homepage row is the open question. But the logic is hard to argue with. Nobody browses anymore. Everybody scrolls.
Search that speaks human
Ask HBO Max goes after the other half of the problem. Instead of typing a title you already know, you describe what you’re in the mood for in ordinary language.
A comedy. A family drama. An epic thriller. The tool takes the description and suggests relevant films and shows.
It’s an attempt to make content search feel more natural and more personalized, which is a polite way of saying the old search bar only helps people who already know what they want.
Why this is happening now
The change is about how users discover films and series on the platform. That’s the whole framing, and it’s telling.
Streaming libraries got big. Attention got small. The interface that worked when a service had 400 titles doesn’t work when it has thousands, and every platform is now quietly admitting that the grid was never the answer.
HBO Max is calling Ask HBO Max experimental, so treat it as such. Features labeled that way have a habit of disappearing.
For now, the pitch is simple: two mobile tools, one that shows you things and one that listens. Whether either of them gets you to press play on something you’d otherwise have scrolled past is a question the swipe count will answer.
