Your days of pirating HBO programming by mooching off your parents’ or friends’ HBO Go password may be soon coming to an end.
During a presentation to Time Warner investors, network chairman and CEO Richard Plepler announced plans for HBO to offer a stand-alone streaming service in the U.S. beginning next year. Citing 10 million homes that have broadband access but no cable service, this potentially offers HBO to a far larger audience. Presumably, this would be a version of HBO Go that doesn’t require a subscription to the channel via a cable provider.
HBO would then essentially be like Netflix (which has surely cut into the cable channel’s business) as far as broadband subscribers are concerned, with the network’s catalog of movies, TV series and sports programming available any time for people to watch on their computers, TV streaming devices such as Roku or Apple TV, phones and tablets.
Naturally, cable providers probably won’t be happy with HBO’s decision, as this gives more people a reason to cut the cord and get all of their programming through the internet. That could be a considerable obstacle for HBO to overcome, though other networks like Showtime could eventually follow this example and offer a similar stand-alone or “over-the-top” service.
Vulture’s Josef Adalian points out that an HBO streaming service will likely cost about the same (15 dollars?) as it does to add to your cable package, so perhaps there won’t be as much migration. (Though paying $15 for HBO as opposed to $200 for your entire cable bill is obviously a significant difference.) After all, consumers will still largely have to get their broadband service from cable companies.
