1y ago

HBO Max is removing features from my plan without reducing my price.

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311 comments

So right after I signed up at the beginning of this year, they switched from HBOMax to "Max." I paid for a year in advance, and of course when I signed up there was nothing about them switching to a new brand. All of a sudden it was full of trash reality shows and ID Discovery true crime. I have no idea what possessed them to do that.
Then once it switched over I stopped being able to stream any new HBO shows on mobile and customer service won't refund me any amount. Not that I can even communicate with them effectively. It's all "chat" with AI or people who have no idea what I'm saying. Half the shows still won't play on mobile for me.
TL;DR I paid for a year of HBO. They changed their selection a few months in. I lost mobile access to a bunch of their shows. And now I'm losing even more features before the year is up. That's quite literally not what I paid for.
How exactly is any of that legal? Genuine question. What about the Federal Trade Commission? Isn't there fucking anybody regulating these corporations in the US?
- Ask them for a refund, in writing, document everything, and if they refuse, take it to your state's AG office. Obviously I can't speak for every state, but mine has slapped around whirlpool when they refused to fix a defective fridge, dell when they refused to replace a monitor with dead pixels, etc. I've never had a bad experience. It's amazing how a letter from your local AG's office will suddenly make companies be less shitty to you.
  
  Letter to your state insurance investigation board also help claims magically settle faster
  
  takes notes
  
  What we really need is an instance of GPT-4 trained on every court case in history as well as Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, Clark Howard, Rosemary Shahan, etc, and instructed to act like a small town genius lawyer in a John Grisham novel.
  Basically a chatbot absolutely full of ideas about how to punish corporations for shitty business practices. A resource center for consumer advocacy.
  
  If they won't refund then do a charge back on your card.
- How exactly is any of that legal? Genuine question. What about the Federal Trade Commission? Isn’t there fucking anybody regulating these corporations in the US?
  There are government websites you can report this to, though I do not know what effect that will have.
  IANAL, but my understanding is that if you paid for a year for a certain set of services they have to give you those services for the whole year, or refund you your money.
  
  They also likely claimed during the merger that it wouldn't effect customers. Of course we knew that was a lie.
  
  It’s always a lie.
  
  Until each and every one of us reading this commits to expending the energy, and sacrificing the leisure time, to actually pursue what small options we have, this is only going to get worse.
  
  That, and voting into office people that'll actually write regulation laws to curb these bad behaviors from corporations.
- If you paid for a service you were not rendered, presumably with a credit card, and attempted remediation with the company, hopefully in writing or recorded in some form, you can do a charge back with your credit card.
- I had purchased a year in advance last fall and when it switched over, it only didn't play on m9bile for me for a week, then I was able to stream on mobile regularly. However, with their changes, I chose not to renew my subscription. Their quality is degrading quite a bit, it was no longer worth it.
- The only way this becomes less likely in the future is if you sue them. Given you’re locked into a year contract, a lawsuit is the only kind of consequences they might face.
- Thats the same time that they cancelled raised by wolves. Fuck discovery and fuck corporate mergers.

311 comments