GoKawiilis a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
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Warner Bros. Discovery is bringing a vertical video feed to HBO Max to help you find something new to watch. Streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney Plus, and Peacock already offer TikTok-like vertical video feeds to surface content that might be interesting to users, and now HBO Max will have a similar feed of its own.
The feed, called “HBO Max Shorts,” will be accessible from an icon on the bottom navigation menu. It will show you things like trailers, clips, and bonus content from the HBO Max library, and it’s tailored to you based on your watch history. You can jump into a show or movie right from the HBO Max Shorts clip or add it to your list if you want to bookmark it for later. HBO Max Shorts will be tested first with “select iOS users” in the US before coming to more markets and devices.
Here’s WBD’s explanation of how it makes the clips for the feed — it relies on a mix of an AI tool and HBO Max editors:
The clips for this feature are powered by an AI tool built in-house, 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. Once the tool has suggested these clips, HBO Max editors decide which best represent the stories viewers love and capture jaw dropping moments, pivotal plot twists, and visually stunning sequences. These clips are then rendered in a new vertical video experience to ensure seamless playback. Looking ahead, “HBO Max Shorts” will expand to include additional devices and markets, incorporate sports content, and refine as users interact with the feature.
WBD is also testing an “experimental conversational search experience” for HBO Max that lets users search for content with natural language queries, and it’s available first for adult users on Android in the US. Netflix is testing a similar feature.