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Welcome to Lowpass! This week: Max makes peace with algorithms, and Netflix’s GTA bump in one chart.

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How Max wants to move beyond dragons

A couple of months ago, I tweeted a joke about the way streaming services recommend content that went a little bit like this:

Netflix: Here’s a nichey new Korean crime drama that perfectly complements what you’ve been watching …

Max: DRAGONS! SEX AND THE CITY! MOAR DRAGONS!

While admittedly hyperbolical, the joke seemed to hit a nerve: Netflix has long practiced hyper-personalization, while many of its competitors still market themselves like TV networks, with a big emphasis on tentpole shows that would have been primetime programming in a different, pre-streaming era. 

Max has long been one of the worst offenders when it comes to these overly broad recommendations, likely because of its DNA: More like any other cable network, HBO has been known for tentpole shows, be it The Wire, Game of Thrones, Succession or The Sopranos. In fact, when HBO launched its first standalone streaming service in 2020, executives touted human curation as a key differentiator to Netflix.

What maybe, kind of, worked for HBO clearly  doesn’t work for Max. Times have changed since those early days. The Warner Bros. Discovery merger resulted in a much broader content library, with reality TV titles like Property Brothers now standing next to HBO shows like House of the Dragon.

That’s why the service has begun to lean more heavily into algorithmic recommendations, as Warner Bros. Discovery Product & Design SVP Liesel Kipp told me during an interview this week. “The key focus for us is really making sure that every time a customer opens Max, we’re getting them the right content at the right time,” Kipp said.

The algorithms have arrived. Kipp’s team began testing a more personalized Max homepage within the service’s streaming apps this winter. After seeing what she called a “meaningful lift” of engagement metrics, algorithmic personalization was rolled out to all customers across the service in recent weeks. This includes rearranging individual rows, as well as the order of titles within a row, to match the taste of each and every subscriber.

At the same time, Max isn’t giving up on its dragons altogether: The service will still highlight tentpole moments with an editorial voice, Kipp said. “It has to be a blend of those things.”

Don’t show too much of a good thing. Another effort now implemented widely is what Kipp called deduplication: “[We are] improving our catalog exposure by removing repeat titles across a page. [We’re] trying to really get that right: How many times do we show a title before we understand that it may not be relevant to the user?”

That’s actually easier said than done. Just before jumping on a Zoom call with Kipp, I took another look at my own Max experience, and noticed that the A24 movie Love Lies Bleeding showed up four times. (Don’t get me wrong: It’s a great movie! But also … the reason I know this is that I already watched it.)

Kipp acknowledged that work on deduplication is far from done. “I would love to tell you that we’ve got that figured out,” she said. “I think there's going to be A/B testing on that for quite some time, just to make sure that we understand what those thresholds look like.”

Plus, in some cases, it does make sense to present the same title in multiple contexts. One example: If a movie or show shows up in the Top 10 charts. “That's a very factual rail. We will not remove a title from Top 10,” she said.

Giving viewers more of a voice. Another feature Max is currently exploring are viewer ratings. The service has plans to A/B-test “like,” “love” and “not for me” buttons, but Kipp’s team is still working out the details – especially when it comes to actually responding to those individual choices. “When the customer tells us that they don't like something, then we need to really show them that we heard that and we're doing something as a result,” she said.

The streamer is also exploring the use of more implicit signals, Kipp told me. “We really want to understand a lot about the user,” she said. “Their context, their device, where they are, the time of day, the metadata within the content, and the content relationships, to make sure that we get content discovery right for them.”

For now, Max doesn’t use signals like time of day yet to personalize subscriber homepages, but Kipp called it something “we discuss quite a bit.”

“We're about 15 months into this product, and we have a lot of work ahead of us,” she added.

Update: This post was updated on 8/8 to clarify details on future testing and personalization plans.

Netflix gaming in one chart

I wrote a story about Netflix’s video game strategy for Fast Company this week. Go check it out, if only to learn what happened to Bandersnatch and other interactive title!

Here’s a chart that didn’t make it into the story:

Those are download stats for Netflix’s mobile games, according to estimates from app intelligence startup Appfigures. And in case you are wondering: That spike is caused by Netflix releasing three Grand Theft Auto mobile games in December.

One number to know: $0.75

That’s the average gross profit Vizio made with every TV it sold in Q2 of 2024, according to the company’s newly-released earnings report.

The TV business truly is one of razor-thin margins, which is why every TV maker is trying to make as much money as possible with ads and services. In Vizio’s case, each of the company’s 19 million smart TVs currently in people’s homes brought in more than $35 in ad revenue over the past 12 months.

What else

Streaming is finally making money for Disney. The company’s streaming biz, which includes Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+, generated an operating income of $47 million in its most recent quarter.

Now, the password crackdown is coming. Disney will force people to sign up for an ad-on plan if they share accounts starting in September.

Only 7000 people own a Humane AI pin. The company has shipped around 10,000 AI wearables to date, but returns reportedly surpassed sales in recent months. Humane had originally planned to ship 100,000 units this year. Ouch!

Roku is launching a free sports channel. The FAST channel will stream live MLB games and Formular E races, among other things.

Musk’s X is “the home of social media piracy.” That’s according to a number of major sports leagues, including La Liga, Bundesliga and the Premiere League.

Video game voice actors are on strike. The Screen Actors Guild wants better AI protection for voice actors, among other things.

Google has a new streaming device. The new $99 streaming device replaces the company’s existing Chromecast dongles.

Sonos delays two new products to focus on fixing its app. The company is getting help from board member (and former Pandora CPO) Tom Conrad to get back on track.

That’s it

My wife has been traveling a bit for work lately. For some reason, she’s been bringing home bagels from each of her trips … and, I know people will hate me for this, but: Los Angeles bagels are better than New York bagels. Don’t @ me, as the kids say these days …

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!

Photograph by Ollie Upton/HBO, courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery.