They make a lot of high quality shows in my opinion, and have made a lot of great ones in the past. Max is a better service than Netflix in my opinion.
HBO make shows that feel closer to the "human condition" than most other companies.
Max has the following great shows:
Game of Thrones
House of the Dragon
The Sopranos
Oz
What We Do In The Shadows
The Wire
Silicon Valley
Rick and Morty
True Detective Season 1
Rome
+++
The only inconvenience this is causing me is pricing out additional storage for my NAS.
I know I may not be the majority here, and I may not be the target audience these tactics are focused on, but for me, these companies aren’t getting my money this way. Microcenter is.
Max is a fucking dump. Got the 50% half off price in Denmark when they released HBO Max. Then max is released, and my subscription was changed to full HD, when I had 4K. No worries, my TV is 1080p only anyway (it's old, top of the line 2012 model, no HDR or anything fancy, but I'm cheap, so I'll get a new one when it breaks , hopefully tomorrow lol), so I kept the subscription.
Last month, I got an ad on a single Rock and Morty episode. Last weekend, I got ads on everything. Cancelled straight away. Anything on Max, Prime or Disney somehow ust magically appears on my Plex when I add the movie/series on the watchlist.
My tv and eating habits since 2020 have only been getting better by these changes. Once every streaming service no longer allows password sharing we will be done with TV. So many of their platforms are incredibly awful to navigate anyways.
Paid plex + Emby shares. C/piracy can’t fathom paying $5-10/mo for a catalog of almost all media ever (and if it’s not there, request it) that works well on multiple platforms and has a high spouse approval factor but it’s fantastic.