How well does HBO Now work?

Cafe Society
1

Game of Thrones begins Sunday and with such a short season, we can get a free trial week and one month of HBO Now and watch the whole season as it airs. We’ve never streamed a “live” broadcast where the thing is airing on TV as you stream it.

My questions are this:

  1. When Game of Thrones airs, you can just turn on HBO Now and it somehow plays the episode as it airs on cable TV?

  2. Can you pause it while it airs or not?

  3. Does it work well? Are we going to find that it won’t load or is crashing under server loads or something? I imagine a ton of people are going to be hitting the service to watch the final Game of Thrones episodes.

  4. So…uh, the latest episode just kind of gets “activated” or something right when it airs on TV?

Thanks!

2

I got rid of called last year and just added HBO Now and had the same questions. Especially about whether I can watch GoT at 9 pm Sunday.

3

The website has landing pages for all the series, so at 8:55 PM I go to the GoT page and start pounding the refresh button. At some point in the next few minutes the page loads with the new episode at the top and I hit play. You can pause, rewind, whatever (I assume you can jump ahead if you want, but I’ve never tried) while it’s playing. I’ve generally had very good luck with the reliability of the stream. Not universally good luck, but I’ve lived in places with very poor internet connections so I’ve never been sure whether I should be yelling at HBO or my ISP when it lags.

4

It works pretty well, but you have to clear the cache a lot.

5

I watch HBO through Amazon. You can live stream but you can’t pause and you can’t turn off captioning.

The captioning is annoying because it lags a good 30 seconds behind the actual dialogue.

6

I researched this, and the answer seems to be “yes, it will stream on HBO NOW at the same time” from many sources.

I’ll be watching through the HBO Now App on my smart TV. Hopefully it goes off without a hitch.

https://help.hbonow.com/Answer/Detail/252

7

I will not be surprised if this is the case, even though I assume HBO has scaled up its servers and network for this event. You may not be able to watch the show live.

8

I watched all of last season “live” through HBO Go on Apple TV, at the exact starting time of the episode. Never had any problem with it not starting. I would think HBO Now would work the same way, the only difference being how you sign into the service.

9

My guess is that there are more people streaming HBO this year rather than last year and there is also a crazy amount of interest in this last season.

10

Thinking of waiting until the GOT series is done and binging it during the free trial week…

Brian

11
  1. Yes
  2. Yes
  3. Depends on your home connection but yes.
  4. Yes

I think we got it through Amazon Prime and then watch on TV through Roku.

12

I just subscribed through Hulu and the HBO Now website allowed me to sign in immediately on their site as well.

I see that my Hulu Plus app on my Samsung TV does not seem to have the Hbo added feature and my tv no longers offers a HBO Now app.

I guess I’ll just stream on my laptop or chromebook and connect the device to my TV via HDMI cable.

13

So how was the streaming quality last night during the season premiere?

14

I had the resolution drop once for a few seconds, but no buffering delays or connection issues. I’m happy with it.

15

This.

I use HBO Now, Starz, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and Google Play. HBO is the only one that will tend to have problems after a couple of hours of watching, requiring me to clear out my Chromecast for some reason. Still a great service though!

16

I understand that in Spain it broke; all of HBO Spain was down for a couple of hours.

They sure can’t complain they didn’t have people trying to connect…

17

I have never had an issue with the dedicated apps on AppleTV, Roku or iPad. No difference from cable. (On 35mbps intertubes)

On a several year old smart tv or a browser, it can suck.

No experience with other streaming devices, Android apps or game consoles.

18

Which time zone are you in? Because it would be nice, if you’re on the West Coast, to be able to watch stuff from the Eastern time zone feed. That’s not always possible with cable channels.

19

Looked great on my computer. Would prefer TV but PS3 stopped supporting it

20

FWIW HBO Now worked fine for me. I used it to rewatch the finale of the previous season again which ended around 9:20 pm and after exiting and reentering the Game of Thrones section the premiere of Season 8 was available. Other than a tad of pixelation in spots I noticed no traffic related issues.