Max taps in-house AI to pick the best video preview moments

There is a special kind of fatigue that comes with scrolling past hundreds of static movie posters on a streaming app, only to end up watching nothing at all.

Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max wants to fix that with a familiar streaming trick, backed by a new workflow. This week in the U.S., Max began rolling out dynamic video previews on its homepage for connected TV devices. When you hover over a title with a preview available, a short video clip automatically plays at the top of the screen to give you an immediate taste of the content.

Critically, you will not be trapped in an unmuted nightmare if you hate it. Users across all subscription tiers can toggle both video and audio previews on or off in the settings and playback menu. Tyler Whitworth, Max’s Chief Product Officer, noted that short video context helps viewers make faster, more confident choices about what to watch.

Letting AI dig through the archives

Autoplaying clips on a homepage is hardly groundbreaking—Netflix has leaned into it for years. What makes Max’s push interesting is how those clips get picked.

Manually scrubbing through thousands of catalog titles to find the right ten-second clip takes an absurd amount of human labor. To solve that, Max is rolling out an in-house AI-assisted tool in the coming weeks. The tool scans Max's vast catalog to identify "Drop-In Moments"—scenes that are instantly recognizable, engaging, or quintessential to that specific show or movie.

WBD Chief Technology Officer Avi Saxena said the technology will significantly cut down the manual hours needed to curate clips. Importantly, Max is keeping humans in the loop: the AI recommends the standout moments, but the human editorial team makes the final call on what appears on the homepage.

As The Verge pointed out, this homepage refresh comes during a busy period of interface tweaks for Max, which recently shifted navigation to the left side of the screen and is preparing to officially rebrand back to HBO Max this summer.

Why it matters

We think this is one of the most practical, zero-hype uses of AI in entertainment right now.

For viewers, static box art is often a terrible indicator of tone. A well-chosen, fifteen-second scene tells you more about dialogue rhythm, humor, and production value than any splashy marketing banner. Giving users full control to mute or disable autoplay also avoids the early missteps that turned Netflix’s aggressive previews into a widespread annoyance.

For the streaming industry, this highlights where generative and analytical AI actually delivers immediate ROI. Media giants are sitting on decades of back-catalog content that rarely gets surfaced. Paying video editors to manually re-cut thousands of vintage HBO and Warner Bros. shows just for hover previews makes no financial sense. AI-assisted curation bridges that gap cheaply.

Max looks smart here by resisting the urge to automate the entire pipeline. Letting AI handle the tedious search across thousands of hours of video, while leaving the taste-driven editorial decision to humans, strikes the right balance between scale and quality control.