My first thoughts of HBO Max were negative, mainly because of its parent company, AT&T. I’ve always thought that AT&T couldn’t be good at any business venture besides DSL and land lines. When you look at their track record you’ll understand. Those negative thoughts were almost cemented when I found out that HBO was being pulled from numerous cable, satellite and streaming services. This in my opinion was them asserting themselves as the new ‘Big Dog’ in the kennel. Them saying “Hey, we may be deviant, clumsy, unprepared and may not even be interested in what you’re doing but we’re here to shake things up.”

I subscribed to HBO Max mainly for research, but in all honesty, I really wanted to see how long it would take for them to fail as we seen with the now defunct streaming service Quibi. I knew they had great content, I just genuinely believed they didn’t know what to do with it. They fumbled DirecTV. The number 1 satellite TV provider was reduced to atoms in the hands of AT&T. Their confusing streaming services with even more confusing cable like price structure were/are destined for failure. So I thought/think. Sorta….Maybe.

Browsing the HBO Max platform seemed useless and a complete waste of time. The good stuff was always on the home page. Their secondary content to me was extremely outdated block buster hits that I’ve seen numerous times either on other platforms or years ago. “You’re late to the party AT&T, try something new“, is what I said to myself, and I only visited the platform about once a month. At one point I browsed through everything they had to offer and still I wasn’t impressed.

Just as I was thinking about cancelling my subscription HBO Max started offering same day premiers. This to me was a game changer, “no other streaming service is doing this“. “Instead of spending $40+ going to a movie theater I can watch the film at home, comfortably whenever I want… I’m in.” During this time my thoughts on the service began to change, at the same time more secondary content was being added. My viewership on the platform went from 1 movie to 2 or 3.

This lasted about 2 week or until I watched everything of interest to me. The content just doesn’t flow like it does on other triple A plats like Netflix or Hulu. Now we’re back at a slow pace. I’m back to only visiting the service about once or twice per month to see what’s been added. My main reason for paying the $14.99 per month is for the same day premiers. Without that I’d probably ditch the service and call it a day.