Max subscribers may not have noticed yet, but Warner Bros. Discovery quietly began rolling out a new homepage personalization system last December, when it began A/B testing the redesign. Now, as of the end of July, the changes have been implemented across all US adult profiles.
So what’s new on the Warner Bros. home screen. Discovery streamer?
Essentially, Max now knows more intelligently which TV shows and movies to recommend for each individual user’s profile – and which Stop suggest, if the data shows that you are not interested in it. The goal, as with most of Max’s product updates, is to more efficiently connect viewers to the content they love, Warner Bros. said. Discovery Group senior VP of global streaming product Liesel Kipp. Variety.
On the Max homepage, the vertical rail order and horizontal recommendations within each rail are now arranged differently for each user, depending on their own individual tastes and preferences, Kipp said. A key element of the new system: “We’re really leaning toward de-duplicating titles so that we can improve the visibility of the catalog by removing repeating titles and also balancing that with suppressing viewed content,” she said. What that means, Kipp explains, is that after customers continue to ignore titles after multiple viewings – or if they’ve already viewed them – “we have enough information about what they’ve viewed, and we remove them to make room for other titles. to surface and perhaps more relevant content to watch.”
Kipp said that as a result of the changes to Max, which the team called Whole Page Optimization (WPO), WBD has seen an increase in four specific metrics that are critical to executives when measuring streamer success: efficiency of the homepage (i.e. the frequency with which a visit to the homepage turns into play); time viewed in the product; number of return visits to Max; and the diversity of content viewed.
“It’s clear that the more value you get from the catalog, the more likely they are to choose Max and stay with us,” Kipp said. “That’s the top four we always look at.”
What’s next: The Max team is working on additional updates, including a button to restart a title from the beginning, instead of having to go back to the beginning yourself, and an option for customers to rate titles with ‘Love ‘, ‘Like’ and “Not for me.”
Several of the current projects are being developed using generative AI technology. “We are experimenting with gen AI to help our algorithms pick up additional context on titles, including social and emotional context of scenes in programs,” Kipp said. “This helps make our current recommendations more relevant. And it’s a really ongoing era of innovation and experimentation for us. There is much more to come.”