HBO Max: the worst-rated streaming service with an image problem.
HBO Max; another streaming service battling for your attention.
And although they have a catalogue of content that people love — like Game of Thrones — their app is the worst-rated across both the Apple and Google app stores.
Review on IOS: “Content is great, app is embarrassing”
From what I can tell, that quote is fairly representative of the public consensus — backed up by more than 30 million ratings, across the 8 major streaming services.
Here’s how they compare:
What’s interesting though, is that despite surplus user feedback condemning the app, the overall experience is actually quite good.
The biggest (and most obvious) problem, is that it’s massively let down by poor performance.
As an example, below are four cover art images for Rick and Morty, with their raw file sizes, across four major streaming platforms.
Would you be able to guess which is which? (Probably not, except HBO’s, which is crisp as ****).
Albeit a crude comparison (because the images are different), it broadly demonstrates just how much larger the imagery on HBO Max actually is.
(From top-left; HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Apple TV and Netflix).
This isn’t an isolated example.
Below are comparative raw sizes for three shows: (Big Bang Theory, Friends and Rick & Morty) — in that order.
On average, HBO’s comparative images are more than 4x larger than the industry standard.
From a UX perspective, it’s important to underscore the trade-off that’s happening here: high-quality imagery looks amazing, but slow loading times dampen the experience.
There’s a principle called the Doherty Threshold, which is often banded around in various forms, but in short states that users enjoy experiences with less than a 400ms latency. On slow internet connections, HBO certainly falls short.
And it’s intuitive: people like using things that feels responsive.
But this is a double-whammy, because HBO have also failed to consider what using the app is like without a fast connection.
One solution: lazy-loaded labels.
More broadly though, my advice is two-fold:
So there you go. HBO: compress your images, please.
There are other reasons why I believe HBO is so poorly rated. To read the full UX analysis, head over to Built for Mars. (8-minute read).
