HBO Max chief Tony Gonclaves says he has heard your complaints and is well aware many are wondering why the new streaming service isn’t offering titles in 4K, Dolby Vision/HDR and Dolby Atmos.
Speaking to The Verge this week, Gonclaves was asked about the curious absence of this highest quality of home streaming tech that services like Disney+, Amazon Prime and Hulu offer and do so at a lower price point.
Gonclaves explains it as a matter of prioritization – basically to meet the launch deadline for the service and make sure it’s functional, they had to delay a few things they wished to do in order to get things working:
“I’m not going to have a feature dialogue with you, but as somebody that likes to get close to the metal, I can tell you that there’s a lot of features and a lot of capabilities that we would have liked to launch with that we didn’t.
It just comes down to a matter of priority and getting a product to market. When you’re asking about 4K, Dolby Vision/HDR and Dolby Atmos – not unimportant and definitely something on the roadmap. It had to be a deliberate choice of what to launch with and when. And those trade-offs happen daily. It’ll come. It wasn’t forgotten. I think it was just a deliberate prioritization.”
Gonclaves’ co-worker and HBO Max’s head of original content Sarah Aubrey meanwhile recently chatted with THR about “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” and how those involved consider the project a success already due to the word of mouth. She also isn’t concerned about other filmmakers demanding similar treatment:
“I don’t worry about it opening up a Pandora’s box. It’s not going to be one size fits all. [As for the Snyder cut,] I think it’s already a success given the press we’ve had around it.”
HBO Max launched on May 27th and while conspicuously absent of a number of titles, and some complaints about its interface structure, subscribers are apparently mostly happy. The lack of these high quality options, and the service being unavailable on Amazon Fire and Roku devices, have been the biggest complaints to date.
