HBO Is Getting Down In The Slop With Everyone Else

HBO is one of the last brands standing in quality TV entertainment. Nobody bats 1,000, but HBO misses less often than most. But it hears the barbarians at the gates. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. And its response, like so many of its competitors, has been to announce a new short-form vertical video feed.

It’s called HBO Max Shorts. It’ll live behind a little icon on the home screen and be populated with clips from the HBO library. You can scroll through them and then click to add the full episodes or movies to your watch list and go back to them later or, more likely, just keep scrolling. Surprise, the whole thing is powered by AI! Here’s HBO’s pitch (via The Verge):

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.

This is hardly groundbreaking stuff. Netflix, Disney, all the cool streaming platforms are doing it. How else to get people to stop putting House of Dragons on as background noise to the group chat on Instagram and actually get people to give you their full attention? Well, add a group chat, for one. That’s something HBO and other streaming platforms are decidedly not doing, and it’s something that make it hard to really compete with the social media algorithms that keep poking into every corner of our lives.

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos famously told GQ back in 2013 that his goal was “to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” This was back when the streamer was placing bets on high-quality hits like House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black. Instead, Netflix ended up becoming a version of on-demand cable: not always great but very often good enough. Now both HBO and Netflix are racing to become YouTube before YouTube can eat the rest of the internet.

No one’s going to win a content war with Google or the other tech giants, especially as they reengineer the media ecosystem around easy-to-consume slop that keeps the lizard part of your brain happy and the rest of it from running into the void screaming. I don’t think HBO Eat My Shorts is going to change any of that. Why pay for 60-second clips of Sopranos that Instagram is already serving me up for free alongside snippets of everything else that exists online?

The good news is that HBO’s identity crisis can play out without Paramount sending its goon squads in to call the shots, at least for a little while. A judge has put Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. on hold for a year. Plenty of time for HBO to continue debasing the rest of its golden archives.