Max wants to push alerts on viewers when there is breaking news on CNN.
variety.com
CNN Max is likely to evolve over time. Among the features the company will try out are ways of alerting Max viewers to breaking news while they are watching something else on the service, whether it be an HBO series, a Turner Classic Movies selection or an old episode of Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.”
The enshittification of our world continues unabated.
Great, a CNN "Breaking News" update interrupting your movie or show every time Trump pinches off a fresh new loaf on Pravda Social; just what everyone wants!
I'm not currently subscribed, but if they don't have an option to disable this I will never subscribe again. For that matter, any streaming service that doesn't allow me to watch a movie/show uninterrupted from beginning to end is a showstopper for me. I can only imagine what streaming services will start doing if they are okay with adding a banner or cutting a stream for news. Ads will be right behind it.
Yeah, then they get bolder and force full-screen ads in the middle of a film and then exhausted subscribers (the three that will be left) will force a co cession from the corporate to have the ads blocked together instead of randomly popping up... Oh wait...
I have the cbs news app on my phone. Yesterday I got a breaking news push notification informing me that someone caught a big alligator. I can't imagine the rage I'd be filled with if I was immersed in a show only to be interrupted by a pop up like that.
Or to use the recent hurricane coverage as an example:
Etc. Pop up, pop up, pop up, pop up. Id either stop watching Max or have to ask my doc to prescribe blood pressure meds.
I agree. I can understand interrupting the show for somethings. Earthquake early warning, fine. A celebrity going to rehab, not ok.
But anyways, how's the weather been in Florida and Georgia lately? All good, I presume?
Yeah it's just gonna be "breaking news" that turns out to just be fear mongering. Kinda like how pretty much all major news sources have been for the last 20(?) years.
Hard pass.
Both are now owned by Trump defender David Zaslav, the same guy who decided to rename HBO Max to Max. He has a history of reworking networks. https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/david-zaslav-cnn-chris-licht-warner-discovery-1235634424/
Add HBO and CNN to the enshittification list.
Yep. Zaslav is a real piece of shit. He was also behind cancelling Batgirl and Scoob before they were released and taking a bunch of animated shows off of Max but not making them available anywhere else.
I feel like we need a shakeup to copyright law. If you copyright something and place it for sale, you can't just remove it from sale. And if you do, like in the Zaslav-enshittification, it becomes public domain. Once you create and share something with the world, it isn't really yours anymore. Sure we should enable creators to monetize that for a reasonable amount of time (~20yr or so, or 10yr after death) but deliberately removing creation from being able to legally be seen again is bullshit. If you wanted to keep your shit secret, it shouldn't have been copyrighted and published. /rant
I think we should return to the original copyright laws we had at the beginning of the 20th century. You had to register something to copyright it. If you did, you had a copyright for 19 years with an option to renew at the end of those 19 years. After that, it was public domain.
38 years is more than long enough to profit off of a work.
Yep, imagine if the old laws applied and someone could just create a cheap streaming site with all the stuff that went into the public domain after 20 years. You'd have multiple streaming sites with the same content just competing on service and price instead of what exclusive content they had.
I would definitely think that having a vast PD library available would reduce piracy.
And why the F do we need more than a a year or so after death? Either the estate is raking I'm shitloads or it's not, extra years only helps the most wealthy.
I can see the reasoning behind that, like helping support a spouse and child if the author died young. But if you do the 19+19 thing, when the person died doesn't matter. Just when they created it. It would mean that tons of 1980s movies would be public domain right now. I think that would be just fine.
CNN has been shit for well over a decade now.
CNN is not relevant to me or my generation. It is a rage bait channel for boomers. Nothing productive is ever discussed on there. It is a giant circle jerk about Trump’s latest outrage. They beat every topic to absolute death. I’m sorry, I have other things to do besides watch a bunch of mannequins find ways to fill 12 hours of air time from a 2 minute news clip.
If you start interrupting my escape from the daily news cycle with useless breaking news alerts, not only will I kill you, I’ll also cancel my subscription to Max.
Yeah, this is just a ridiculous idea that only a geriatric boomer could come up with. If there was breaking news we cared about, we'd get a notification on our phone. Unless we intentionally put our phone on silent because we wanted to enjoy something without interruption.
They're really going to push everyone to running their own home servers to watch pirated content again. For a few years they had a product where for a like $10/mo we could just watch whatever without ads, and it was legitimately better than piracy. They're just hell bent on ruining that.
i wish they had a plan that only had hbo content, most of the time the other stuff just gets in the way and is annoying to scroll past. maybe they could call it “hbo max”
HBO used to be my favorite streaming service, I loved it. Now it's full of reality tv crap. RIP.
That's why they preemptively dropped "HBO" from the old "HBO Max" moniker.
Get HBO classic for an additional $14.99!
Don't give them any ideas!
Reminds me of MTV
Among all the other bullshit they pulled, the CEO bragged upon purchase of choking the service with cheap to produce reality show crap.
I had HBO in some form for decades, since I was a kid. They were the best and among the last prestige content creators. I dropped HBOs corpse last year over it. Fuck this late stage capitalism race to the bottom.
Also, if somehow all the shit they pulled upon acquisition wasn't enough to stop paying them 160 annually a year ago, this would have been.
I want general grants to be given to small time production teams, even if some of the teams are teenagers. I always think of all the great stories we are missing, just because people were skipped over.
A good story can hold its own weight and doesn't need a huge FX budget or popular actors.
"I want general grants to be given to small time production teams"
That's funny. We don't help the little guy here in the US. We funnel everything to the Fortune 1000 and pray for rain.
Anything less would make us dirty commies or something.
I've had multiple issues with very recently released movies (like Crazy Rich Asians) not playing at all and only giving me pixelated nonsense or the aspect ratios being completely fucked up. Never happened on HBO Max. Only since the forced migration to the new app
My nothing-a-month-plan looks better every day.
I could maybe see there being a market for this if the default is not to show them, and there's an option to receive notification of developments on a specific topic. It's better than rabidly refreshing a particular topic that you are specially interested in.
Like, say you live in an area with an approaching hurricane, and you wanted to be alerted if there are any new developments on that particular topic.
However, I have a hard time believing that, in the general case, people want alerts popping up.
The issue is that I can't tell CNN how severe of a breaking news story I want it to be to interrupt what I'm watching. To me, a story worthy of interrupting my show would be like the death of the president or nuclear armageddon or something. But to CNN, breaking news is like so and so celebrity said "Trump bad".
Yep, not only is the idea super annoying, the thing that news networks think should be breaking news is completely out of step with what people actually want to know about.
It's always stuff like 'old celebrity died!', 'Trump did/said something idiotic!', 'we still haven't found MH370!', 'some bullshit about the UK royal family!'.
Unfortunately something like “Biden’s college ex-roomate’s best friend’s cousin was caught on camera saying a bad word!” constitutes “Breaking News” for CNN.
As a reminder, CNN betrayed Americans way back in the early 1990s by selling the first Bush War, and hasn't gotten better since.
Was there mainstream media that didn't try to sell the war? You had to go to stuff like Democracy Now to hear any kind of critical voices.
Piracychads keep winning
Never stopped
It's honestly gotten so good now and lead me to learn so much more about storage hardware and home servers
Yeah I got 30TB of everything from tv to film to comics to music, haven't had to rely on a streaming service since dumping Netflix over a decade ago.
True, but not as helpful for the Turner Classic Movies side of the business. A lot of old films are not available via piracy sites because there isn't much interest in them outside of a niche film buff market. I haven't looked, but I'm guessing I'm not going to see too many Dead End Kids or Boston Blackie movies on a torrent site, but I might on TCM. And now they're going to interrupt that with bullshit.
Just did a quick search and there seems to be some material from both in archive.org, even youtube and theres some DEK movies in yts too. In case you are interested.
They were just examples off the top of my head. There might be options for some of those, but I doubt that TCM's entire library is available for pirate or Internet Archive download.
Sorry, I didnt mean to say that as if you were wrong. You probably are right, tbh.
Still, theres more obscure shit on the internets than people think there is; so I thought I share it.
Piracy is still a viable alternative to oppressive corporations even when you are into old/obscure stuff and, imo, even if the entirety of TCMs catalogue isnt available... yet.
No, I didn't think that's how you were saying it. I think this has been a good discussion.
It depends on how deep you wish to go down the hole.
For me, and especially now that Netflix is ending their DVD service, if I can’t find something old via torrent, I’ll find it on DVD on Amazon, used for as cheap as possible. Then, rip it, and sell it back on Amazon used. Odds are, whoever is buying it from me is doing the same thing I just did.
Not quite the same level of convenience as having it available to stream right away though.
I mean, not immediately, but once you’ve got your collection, you’re pretty much set. You can watch whatever you want, whenever, wherever.
The only streaming service I have these days is Max and that’s only because it’s part of my cellphone plan and I’m grandfathered into that plan as well.
What you don't get to do, which you could do back when TV was just TV and you happened to catch it on, or you could do when it is added to a streaming service, is discover something you didn't know existed.
That’s fair. I’ve discovered some neat old films on Max by just browsing around.
There are some decent discovery services you can use with your torrent software.
I use Ombi which my plex users can log into with their Plex id, discover new/old/etc content and then send an automated request to my Radarr/Sonarr software.
Each users permissions can be configured as to the quality/language/etc of the content as well as which types they can request to automatically download and which require my approval first
But how likely are they to have obscure movies from the 1930s? That was what makes TCM such a gem.
Yeah just as in manually downloading them you're gonna need a decent private tracker or two to reliably find some more obscure stuff like that
If I get a notification that interrupts what I am watching on HBO Max I will never use it again
My question is, what exactly do they consider 'breaking news'? These days every news story starts off with 'breaking news'. If they want to interrupt me so bad, I'll find whatever I want to watch elsewhere.
RSS feeds exist already.
glad I cancelled max, seems like they're mostly a tax shelter at this point
"Max helps you escape into wonderful stories of fiction or documentary drama....except when we interrupt your escape and shove something in your face to return you to reality that everything sucks" -Max probably
Well, I sure as shit won't be subscribing.
The minute I see anything pop up while watching my Bar Rescue I will be cancelling my subscription
This bullshit is going to interrupt me during my 14th rewatch of Entourage?
Something that perhaps I missed in the article is if CNN Max will be a new app or will the use the existing Max app? If it’s the latter then I hope we can disable it.
It's the latter.