I love HBO. And when I have it, it dominates my Sunday night. The programming is just awesome. HBO rarely pilots a crap show (Flight of the Concords, True Blood, Entourage, The Life and Times of Tim and even Hung are all great). Not to mention Real Sports and all of the great HBO original series and specials like Band of Brothers and Generation Kill which, after watching, have prompted me to read the books and buy the DVDs.
The content is just that good. But what pains me, is that if I want HBO, I have to pay for 100 crap stations just to get it. I can’t just get HBO (which is a product of the more general issues with cable station bundling). I am obliged to support and sustain crappy reality TV, Fox News and other television based disasters that shouldn’t even be on the air. It pains me that some of my money is going to these stations.
If HBO were to offer a web-only streaming service to paying customers, I would totally pay 10 or 20 dollars a month directly to HBO for the content. I know there are all sorts of pitfalls (sharing of usernames, cost of development, etc.) but really they could start cutting out the middle men (like Comcast and Verizon) and offer the programming directly to paying customers. They could even buy the distribution channel from a company from Hulu (which arguably is the best TV on the internet viewing experience).
They’d probably make a boat load more money.
As an alternative option, they could go to a company like Roku and offer it as a premium channel through the Roku player (which is what Netflix does for their users who have the set top box).
If it’s all about $ and sustaining the brand, why limit your customer base? This is what I imagine (though the people that want HBO is probably too big of a circle):
Why wouldn’t HBO try to get the entire green circle? Seems like a “duh” situation to me. Do you hear me HBO?
they are getting close. if you buy a season of entourage (or any other series) on itunes, it downloads it automatically as soon as its up. so basically, just buy all the seasons of shows you like, get an apple tv, bobs your uncle, you get what you pay for. the only downside is its not actually officially live yet. you have to wait a day or something before it becomes avaiable. otherwise there would be no benefit to keeping cable. oh, and this eliminated any need to pay and extra $14/mont for DVR as you have all the episodes forever stored on hard drive. not to mention you can drop them onto your ipod and take the episodes with you, or just download them right to the ipod wirelessly from anywhere. the missing link is the real time airings of new episodes.
That’s a nice little hack…I’m going to try this as a trial. But, I don’t think they have all of the programming (like The Pacific) available in the iTunes store.
I think what we both would like is carte blanche to HBO programming (not just a piece meal approach through a 3rd party).
Also, I would rather give the money directly to HBO compared to giving it to Steve Jobs first. I always envision him swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck.