HBO Max Tests TikTok-Style Feed and AI Search for Content Discovery

HBO Max is bringing mechanics familiar from TikTok and Instagram into its own app. The Warner Bros. Discovery platform has launched a vertical, scrollable feed of short clips called Shorts in the United States, along with an experimental conversational search tool, Ask HBO Max, designed to understand queries phrased in plain language instead of exact titles or genres.

How Shorts works

The new Shorts tab appears in the app's bottom navigation menu and works much like TikTok or Instagram Reels: users scroll vertically through short clips from HBO Max's library instead of browsing the catalog or reading descriptions. The system tailors clips to each account's viewing history, drawing on both trailers and selected scenes from titles already available on the platform.

The way the feed is built is the key part. Rather than having a team of editors manually cut thousands of hours of footage, HBO Max uses an in-house AI tool that analyzes metadata at the individual scene level and flags moments with high emotional or visual impact, such as surprises, action beats or dramatic plot turns. Platform editors then review these suggestions and decide which ones actually make it into the app, serving as a quality check on the automatically generated selections.

Search that understands mood

The second new feature is Ask HBO Max, a large-language-model-based search tool that lets users type queries in natural language instead of exact titles. Instead of searching by show name or genre, a user can type something like 'I'm in the mood for a comedy' or 'best movie for a night in with friends,' and the system is meant to interpret the intent and suggest matching titles from the catalog.

The tool is launching for now only on Android and only for adult accounts in the US, suggesting Warner Bros. Discovery is treating it as a test confined to a single platform before a wider rollout. The company has not said when the feature will leave its experimental phase, or whether and when it might expand beyond the United States.

Spoiler risk

Automatically selecting the most eye-catching scenes carries an obvious risk: the moments AI picks out as the most 'grabby' are often the same key plot turning points. Commentators note that a Shorts-style feed could reveal major events from a show or film before viewers get a chance to watch it from the beginning, a different kind of risk than traditional trailers, which are hand-edited specifically to avoid spoilers.

Competing for viewers' time

HBO Max's move fits a broader trend among streaming services losing the battle for user attention to short-video apps. Rather than competing with TikTok or Instagram solely through promotional content posted on those platforms, HBO Max is trying to bring the scrolling mechanic directly into its own app to keep viewers who don't know what to watch, and who might otherwise abandon the app for social media instead.

For the Polish market, this points to a possible direction for HBO Max if testing expands beyond the US, though the company has not announced a timeline for Europe. Polish users of the platform, which operates under the Max brand in Poland, should expect similar AI-driven content discovery features to arrive in future app updates, in line with Warner Bros. Discovery's global strategy.