(Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
If you feel like you're seeing more commercials on Max, you're not wrong.
The streaming service has quietly increased its ad load by 50%, according to PCWorld, which spotted Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) mentioning the change in its support pages.
The ad-based streaming plan for Max originally caps the ad load to “about 4 minutes per hour,” according to archived views of the support pages. But sometime in late February, WBD updated the support page to increase the ad load to “about 6 minutes of ads per hour.”
WBD didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But the company probably increased the ad load to rake in more revenue from users on the ad-based Max streaming plan. Amazon Prime Video has also been increasing the ad load on its service, irking consumers.
In Max’s case, the ad-based plan debuted in 2021 “with a commitment to the lowest commercial ad load in the streaming industry,” Warner Bros. Discovery said at the time.
“Additionally, ads will not play during HBO programming,” the company added. But since then, users have reported commercial breaks during HBO original programs. (Max will soon once again be known as HBO Max.)
Although the ad load change from 4 minutes to 6 minutes isn’t a huge increase, it still might annoy subscribers when some have already suspected Max has been ramping up the number of commercial breaks. “It used to be that ads would play at the beginning of a show and then no more, now they cut into my shows multiple times,” wrote one Reddit user in February.
“Not only are there more ads, they’re more intrusive and more repetitive,” added another user.
Of course, Max users can remove the commercials entirely, but that requires paying for the ad-free plan, which costs $16.99 per month, up from the $9.99 per month for the basic with ads service.