HBO Max Is Launching A New Vertical Feature For Short Form Content. Sound Familiar?

HBO Max is the latest streamer getting into vertical video — sort of.

The platform on Tuesday announced two new mobile features for the U.S. market. The headline one is titled “HBO Max Shorts,” and is “designed to help users discover something to watch by highlighting iconic and memorable scenes from the HBO Max library in a vertical, scrollable feed,” per the platform.

This sounds familiar to me because it brings two things to mind. The first is the endless tiktok accounts that already do this, escaping copyright scrapers by inserting sound effects, chopped up Bruno Mars music etc. The second is Quibi. If you don't remember Quibi, it was the $2 billion dollar short-form platform that Jeffrey Katzenberg launched in 2020 and shut down only 6 months later. The difference, for now, being that HBO is seemingly uninterested in putting original content on this feature. 

Here’s what HBO Max Shorts are not: original content. You can breathe a sigh of relief, ReelShort. The vertical videos are simply trimmings of existing HBO Max programming rendered into a new presentation ratio to push users toward long form consumption. Netflix is doing something similar.

What it does seem to be is another nail in the coffin of America's attention span. People's brains are already rotted to the core by short-form content and this will only make it worse. Look at how gross this sentence is. 

HBO Max Shorts are created by an in-house AI tool, “which helps human editors select and verticalize content by using machine learning algorithms that utilize scene-level metadata to comb through thousands of hours of titles and suggests the most compelling, high-impact scenes for discovery.” If you got all of that, and if “verticalize” is a word. What they want to to take away there is that real people are involved in this process — at some point.

So, instead of watching a series, people will go through the highlight reel curated by robots. Imagine being someone like David Chase, who spent a decade pouring his blood sweat and tears into making an incredible piece of entertainment in 'The Sopranos'. And now you'll have zoomers, brains addled by tiktok already, deciding to go through your life's work via a glorified IG reel instead of watching the entire series. It sucks. 

The one saving grace is their proposed purpose is to push people towards their long form content because I've fallen victim to this a few times. If I see a clip on TikTok or Reels of a movie, sometimes I'll go and watch that movie. But in those cases, it's more like falling for an ad because the movie clip is not what I'm on that platform for. I don't see how this works WITHIN the HBO Max app. If I'm already on HBO Max, why would I go through a highlight reel of a show? 

But what do I know. These guys know what they're doing. Why else would they have changed their app's name 500 times in the last decade.