Summary:
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Warner Bros. Discovery launched AI-powered features for HBO Max, including the vertical video feed HBO Max Shorts.
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Shorts is live in testing with select iOS users, offering personalized trailers, clips, and bonus content.
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Also introduced is Ask HBO Max, a conversational search tool testing with adult Android users in the U.S.
Warner Bros. Discovery rolled out two new AI-powered mobile features for HBO Max on Tuesday, and the headliner is a vertical video feed called HBO Max Shorts.
It is live in testing with select iOS users in the U.S., with more devices and markets to come.
Shorts sits behind its own icon in the app’s bottom navigation bar. Tap it, and you get a full-screen scrollable feed of trailers, clips, and bonus content pulled from the HBO Max library, personalized to your watch history.
If something catches you, you can jump straight into the full episode or film or drop it into My List without leaving the feed.
An in-house AI tool combs scene-level metadata across thousands of hours of titles and scores individual scenes on how likely they are to hook someone who has never watched the show.
HBO Max editors then take that ranked list and choose the clips that best represent each title, reformatting them for vertical playback. Deepna Devkar, senior vice president of machine learning engineering, said the AI application speeds up clip creation and the company plans to expand it quickly. Sports shorts are on the roadmap.
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The second feature is Ask HBO Max, an experimental conversational search tool testing with adult users in the U.S. on Android. Instead of typing keywords, subscribers can search in plain language with phrases like “in the mood for a comedy” or “best movie for a girls night in.”
HBO Max is a bit late to this compared to it’s other competitors. Netflix, Disney+ and Peacock all shipped vertical feeds first. The shared logic is that enormous libraries have become a liability, viewers scroll instead of picking, and the phone is now where discovery happens.
