HBO Max found itself roasted by some Fire TV users who struggled to watch its Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon during its Sunday night debut.
According to complaints shared on Twitter and Reddit, the HBO Max app for Amazon’s streaming platform kept crashing when they tried to watch the highly-anticipated series. Some of these posts noted one unlikely fix: create a new user profile in the app and then use that to watch.
In a report at The Verge, Richard Lawler quoted HBO’s Chris Willard as saying the service was “aware of a small portion of users attempting to connect via Fire TV devices that are having issues and are in the process of resolving for those impacted users.”
HBO Max did not return an email sent Monday morning requesting further comment.**
Amazon’s streaming platform was a relatively late addition to the device menu at HBO Max. The then AT&T-owned service didn’t have a Fire TV app at its May 2020 launch and needed another six months or so to conclude a deal with Amazon to fill that gap.
In January, Amazon said it had sold more than 150 million Fire TV devices.
Some of the crankier comments about Sunday’s viewership glitches blamed HBO’s new management at Warner Bros. Discovery, which has already left many viewers unclear about what’s in store for that service since the April merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery.
In August. WBD executives said they would debut a combined HBO Max/Discovery+ service in 2023, In July, the company said it would stop producing original HBO Max series in several European countries—walking back an earlier emphasis on more local content.
And on Friday, HBO Max yanked some 200 episodes of the kids’ TV classic Sesame Street, a surprise that came days after news of HBO Max layoffs and the removal of 36 other titles from the service.
**Update: After publication of this story, Amazon sent this statement: “There was an issue with the HBO Max app, which affected a small number of users attempting to watch House of the Dragon on a subset of Fire TV devices. We’ve worked with HBO to resolve it, and HBO has pushed out a fix resolving the issue.”