Rants by Magic

So, I’ve seen these HBO GO posters all over the city. One of the things I miss about not having a TV and cable is the ability to watch HBO’s original productions, so HBO GO seemed like an awesome solution. But even just looking at the posters I thought, “It sounds as if you might need a cable subscription in order to use it, but that would be the dumbest thing ever so that can’t be the case.” I went ahead and got home to go see what the deal was. Yeah, dumbest idea ever.

You have to have a cable subscription, with HBO, in order to use the service. Who thought this was a good idea? Why would you spend all that money for hosting and bandwidth to bring HBO ONLY to people who are already paying for it? My guess is that it has to do with their contracts. Verizon and Comcast would pitch a fit, and probably threaten to drop HBO all together if they started offering their service à la carte to anyone in the world willing to pay for it. You know what though? Maybe they should. HBO should piss off the major telcos. I’m sure someone will pick them up. See how many people drop Comcast and Verizon for DirecTV when DirecTV is the only one who offers HBO.

The reason I don’t have cable is because it’s too expensive and most of the things on TV are terrible. I’d gladly pay $10/mo for access to HBO GO, assuming it has a large enough library. I’m sure a lot of people would be willing to pay for such a service as well. But I’m not going to pay upwards of $50/mo for cable TV and HBO.