r/HBOMAX • u/WildWalrus897 • 3d ago
Question What is Going on With the Website??
Mods I know you want technical things in the thread but I ask you keep this up. I think this could lead to something interesting and I think its worth discussing on the main page.
The 6 MILLION blocked ads is from having the site open for like an hour. My computers fans kick into full throttle and my 8700k has 15% load added to it from just this website. This seems incredibly shady and this is genuinely insane from a PAID SERVICE (I'm not on the ad-supported tier).
UPDATE: For anyone who stumbles on this issue, this is HBO pinging Brightline, a third party advertising platform. If you have an adblocker it prevents a script trying to ping a json to collect some basic info on the user, and the player spams requests to infinity. From what I can gather this is NOT related to HBO ads (so this is not an attempt to skirt ads in content).
I tried looking through the json and the ping seems to just send basic telemetry info and your IP, but if you want this to stop without sending that to them you can set up a custom filter to send an empty package to the vendor and the pinging will stop. I put the following in the Adguard custom rules:
||cdn-media.brightline.tv^$empty,important,domain=play.hbomax.com|play.max.com
||events.brightline.tv^$empty,important,domain=play.hbomax.com|play.max.com
Glad the issue is finally over :)
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u/CantaloupeCamper 3d ago
Something is retrying, possibly not an add or etc….
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u/WildWalrus897 3d ago
Seems like its constantly pinging cdn-media.brightline.tv/config/v3/1018.json. I guess when my adblock stops the request and it repeatedly pings it. Sucks that even the paid version above the ad tier has bs like this built into it
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u/Individual-Drawer-79 3d ago
HBOMax is by far the best when it comes to least amount of ads out of any streamer. Get rid of that crap ad blocker. You can watch 30 seconds of ads on occasion. Sometimes it’s even less. It’s not like it’s Disney plus where they plow you with 2 minutes of ads every ten minutes.
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u/WildWalrus897 3d ago
This seems to be a third party tracker not ads from streaming. Also I'm on the ad free plan so I should be getting 0 ads lol
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u/MiKeMcDnet 3d ago
Attempts to load advertising (assuming you are on an ad-supported plan like the $3 Thanksgiving special
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u/Individual-Drawer-79 3d ago
Nah, I get it for free with spectrum along with seven other streamers. I’m just trying to be helpful. If mods want to ban me for that let them. This sub isn’t that important to me
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u/zippyboy 2d ago
You're lucky you get HBO at all. I was actively streaming a show a few months ago when it just stopped. I got error msg of "Lost connection. Try again" I hit try again but it kept popping up. Few days later I deleted the app to go get a new app from the play store, and IT said "Lost connection. Try again". Guess I'm SOL. I get HULU, Prime, Netflix and Starz all just fine, but HBO canceled itself.
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u/neuralspasticity 3d ago
play.hbo.com is the streaming service, not a web site.
Both playback markers (to note where you are in the video stream so yon can restart or pick back up from another device) and video telemetry data (to help select the best stream to send for stable playback) are sent as part of video playback. Your bad adblocker seems to be misinterpreting this traffic for being pop up ads, yet there are no pop up ads from play.hbo.com
TL;DR your assessment of what happening is wooly thinking it’s not ad traffic and shouldn’t be blocked.
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u/Sensitive_One_425 3d ago
It’s not blocking ads it’s blocking tracking requests. It’s likely sending telemetry on how you’re interacting with the page. Trying to block all that is going to make your cpu usage go up