The bumper…I don’t know what it’s called…that little clip with the snow that fades in and reveals the logo.
It’s terrible.
For one, a lot of people actually don’t know what TV static is. Analog broadcasts stopped almost 16 years ago, and before that, most younger people had cable.
For another, static is really difficult to compress. It looks horrible and consumes way too much bandwidth for just a couple of seconds that won’t even load right. If anything, they should cache a local copy of the bumper in-app in a format that doesn’t look like ass when every pixel changes every frame.
NPR did a podcast on those “bumpers” (there’s a term that I don’t recall). HBO wanted to change theirs for the reason you indicated as well as the fact that it was rather long compared to Netflix’s and others. They paid a lot of money to develop others and also do testing\ polling with end users. The original beat out all the rest because it’s been their bumper for so long.
I prefer the original too. It’s like the macOS boot sound and Apple trying to get rid of it — it’s too much of a classic.
In the UK they’re called ‘idents’. You can find a huge collection of UK ones here https://theident.gallery/