I might be giving the average HBO Go user too much credit but it’s trivially easy to hook up a PC to a TV. Even tablets and phones increasingly come with mini-HDMI hookups these days. I’ve watched a few HBO things using the PC->TV route that they make available exclusively via the streaming service but not directly via On Demand style cable features (Flight of the Conchords for example).
By the way, that puzzles me more than them not selling independent HBO Go subscriptions: HBO programing that is only available via streaming online.
Sure–that’s how I’m accessing this board as we speak. But I do think it’s relatively rare for people to do this; and if someone already has cable or satellite, I still think they’d rather use their DVR to watch shows instead of going through HBO GO.
Yeah, but we’re talking about people who don’t have cable/sat. The providers don’t want HBO Go sold independently because then less people would need cable. As it is, you need a cable/sat subscription to access legally streaming HBO shows and that’s how the providers want to keep it. I’m sure their agreements with HBO reflect that.
My PC/TV point was just that, if all you cared about was some HBO programming, you could just drop your cable/sat, get HBO Go and stream it to your TV for about the same effect. This is what Comcast, Dish, Direct TV, etc don’t want.
But what I’m saying is that I don’t think there are all that many people who are currently keeping cable or satellite only to access HBO–people that would drop cable or satellite if HBO were decoupled from it.
In any event, I fail to see the economic advantage for HBO. It’s not as though the cable and satellite companies pay HBO to stay coupled to them. The monthly charge for HBO is split between HBO itself and the cable/satellite affiliates. If they sold HBO GO separately, HBO would get 100 percent of that money.
I assume they are via their agreements with HBO and who gets what split. If HBO started offering its service independently, they’d probably be forced to take a smaller split since they’re costing the cable/sat providers subscribers.