(Comments below are specific to HBO, but feel free to substitute any pay-TV channel).
When we moved to our new place in January, we changed cable companies, first because our old provider didn’t offer service in our new neighborhood, our and second because the phone company offered a bundle package that would represent a very significant savings–high speed Internet, land line, and cable for very little more than we’d been paying for just the phone in our old place.
Ever since the move, it seems that we are forced with dismaying frequency to the pay-per-view, on demand listings. Resistance is useless, especially when Fool’s Gold is being played for about the 757th time, and The Wedding Planner has now surfaced once again. We have several HBO channels available to us but damn! Again and again, the SAME OLD S***!!. Oh, and sometimes now the opportunity to watch them in Spanish. We do get all the current series, like True Blood and Real Time With Bill Maher, and we get the comedy specials. But come to think of it, I can’t remember when I last heard them announcing a new, major movie that would be shown next Saturday night, just on a free-with-HBO-subscription basis. Certainly not since we moved here.
So…is HBO itself changing? Or is it the movies themselves, in that fewer and and fewer are being released that have any appeal to our age cohort? OR, is the cable company piping mostly crap to the bundled subscribers? It is certainly possible to do so technically speaking, as I know from having worked in the pay TV field myself for many years. The cable provider can record what is being watched on every single box; this is how they calculate what they have to pay to content providers such as Bravo, Golf, and TCM. It’s free to you with your subscription, but your cable company may have to pay those vendors a tenth of a cent for each box that was tuned to that program at that time.
So is there still a “real”, good HBO that high priced customers are watching, or is everyone getting the same watered down sad memory of what HBO once was?
I have to second to the top package from my satellite provider and everything on the pay channels is crap. I think that the biggest issues for HBO/Cinemax/Starz/Showtime is that the cheap availability of DVDs have rendered them obsolete. Any decent movie will be available to rent or buy loooong before it is offered to cable. Add to this the pressure from Internet and On-demand services and they can no longer compete. Because of this, their programming has shifted to focus on the “made for cable” shows and self produced movies that they can offer exclusively. The rest of their air time is padded with filler that they can get cheap.
Are you saying the programming on HBO/Cinemax etc. is somehow the fault of the cable companies? The Cable company doesn’t have anything to do with what’s being shown on those channels.
HBO hasn’t played good movies in years. Honestly hardly any of the movie channels play good (new and quality, or even old and quality) movies anymore, and you’ll only catch them if you use OnDemand,. And I’ve never had bundled cable. I guess they figure people will go to Blockbuster, Netflix, or Pay-Per-View to get the movies they really want. I don’t have premium cable anymore but I’ve had the opportunity to look through everything available on someone who has premium cable’s OnDemand very recently and it was difficult to find even one good movie to watch. Most were B-movie crap. Premium channels have superb TV shows these days at least.
I agree, it’s all crap these days. I just bought a Samsung Blu-ray player for the instant to your TV feed from Netflix, and I finally have something to watch. I’ll probably drop the pay channels.
I had free HBO for three years when I moved into my apartment and signed up for cable. Hardly ever watched it. When something finally came on that I wanted to watch (From the Earth to the Moon), it had been yanked.
The main reason to have HBO is because of their shows, though their best ones (The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire) are no longer on. Big Love is pretty good though.