HBO Max embraces vertical video with a new 'Shorts' feed

Discovery by Way of TikTok

For years, the streaming industry's biggest unsolved problem has been the paradox of plenty. HBO Max, like its peers, sits on a library so vast that finding something to watch has become its own chore. Warner Bros. is now betting that the answer looks a lot like TikTok. The new "Shorts" feed places a vertical scroll of trailers, clips, and bonus content directly in the app's bottom navigation, putting it one tap away from the home screen. Users can act on a clip immediately — hit play on the full title or save it for later — collapsing the gap between discovery and viewing that has historically been the streaming equivalent of walking through a video store.

What separates this from a simple clip reel is the personalization layer. The feed is tuned to each user's watch history, so what surfaces for a prestige-drama fan looks nothing like what a reality-TV viewer sees. That positioning matters: it turns Shorts from a marketing afterthought into a primary navigation surface, which is exactly how TikTok and Instagram Reels have reshaped attention online.

Scene-Level Metadata Does the Heavy Lifting

Under the hood, Warner Bros. says the clips are powered by an AI tool that ingests thousands of hours of film and TV content at the scene level, then surfaces the most compelling moments for discovery. Human HBO Max editors still make the final cut, but the machine decides what is even in the running. This is a meaningful distinction from older approaches that relied on title-level metadata or manual curation alone. Scene-level analysis allows the system to recommend a two-minute exchange from the middle of a second-season episode, not just a trailer that the studio uploaded.

The blend of AI triage and human editorial judgment is also a hedge. Pure algorithmic feeds have run into brand-safety and tone-deaf recommendation problems at other platforms; pure editorial feeds do not scale to a library of HBO Max's size. Splitting the difference lets the service claim both the personalization of an algorithm and the taste of a programmer.

The AI Search Arms Race Is Already Underway

The Shorts feed is only half of the announcement. Warner Bros. is also testing an experimental conversational search experience that interprets natural-language queries — "in the mood for a comedy," "dysfunctional family drama," "best movie for a girls night in" — and returns recommendations. It is launching first on select Android devices in the U.S., with the vertical feed testing on iOS.

The competitive context is striking. Netflix rolled out a similar AI search experience last year, and Amazon has long offered an AI voice search on Fire TVs that responds to open-ended queries. Disney+ and Peacock have already shipped vertical feeds of their own. HBO Max is not breaking new ground so much as catching up to a feature set that has become an industry baseline. The strategic question is whether being a fast follower is enough in a category where every major service now offers nearly identical discovery tools, and where the real differentiator may increasingly be content rather than the surface that delivers it.