HBO Max: Stream TV & Movies

HBO Now was the name of the digital video streaming service and mobile app for the acclaimed HBO cable television network; it is now known as HBO Max, and it features a few improvements. If you were previously familiar with the HBO Go and HBO Now apps, you should know that they have been discontinued and replaced with HBO Max.

There was a time when you needed a cable TV subscription to at least one HBO channel in order to use the HBO Go app, but the company later introduced HBO Now as a standalone subscription along with a different companion app; you did not even need to have cable TV in your house with this option. You can think of HBO Max as an amalgam of Go and Now because a cable TV subscription is not necessary, but you need to pay for the service separately.

Any discussion related to the HBO Max mobile app needs to start with the massive content catalog. Let's begin by clarifying that HBO and WarnerMedia are two content networks owned by the same company, and you can access pretty much everything these two media giants have to offer with your cable TV subscription or at least $9.99 per month if you do not have cable. The higher tier subscription of $14.99 per month does not have any advertising, which is not really intrusive anyway, but it lets you download content for up to a month of offline viewing. This includes award-winning series such as "The Sopranos," "Game of Thrones," "Sex and the City," "Spawn," and many others; plus, you get Warner Brothers film premieres before they hit theaters.

The HBO Max app is intuitive and straightforward. Competing apps such as Netflix offer more advanced features, but HBO Max gets the job done. There is a library, basic video controls, parental restrictions, and recommendations. You can expect a nice 1080p resolution, but there are not too many 4K titles, which would need to be streamed through Android TV anyway. The breadth and depth of content offered by HBO Max more than makes up for its simple app, and the subscription pricing is quite reasonable.