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Comment by fomopop | Hacker News Reader

AT&T heavily subsidizes HBO for TV and telecom subscribers. $5 with DTV Now or free with AT&T Unlimited plan.

They are definitely playing long game if they’re willing to lose 2.5 million Dish subscribers. HBO makes about $8 per sub from cable companies, so $20m per month. They are probably trying to push it up to their OTT price ($15).

People can still subscribe to HBO Now. Mildly annoying to get it from a separate interface or you have bad internet, but at least there are options.

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Is HBO Now good these days? Last time I used it, it was terrible.

What's terrible about it? It's the only way I've consumed HBO shows since the day it came out (and the reason why I instantly dropped my cable subscription as soon as standalone HBO became an option with HBO Now).

> Is HBO Now good these days? Last time I used it, it was terrible.

If you don't watch live shows anyway, it's (IME) better than HBO-on-Cable, even accompanied by the HBO Go app (which is far more terrible than HBO Now ever was.)

Right, no live Real Time :(

You can also subscribe through Amazon and watch through whatever Amazon Prime app you use.

This is what we do. Works great.

Not really any better of an experience than the HBO Now app, IMO.

It glitches out for me when I tab between browser tabs, but that's the only technical issues. I stay for the content.

Last time I tried to watch something via the HBO Now website, it said I needed to install Flash. That's the definition of terrible for me.

"Is HBO Now good these days? Last time I used it, it was terrible."

This isn't an issue for me because I have DirecTV, etc., but if it were I would simply sign up for HBO Now, pay full price, but never use it and download from bittorrent in leech mode[1].

I will happily defend that behavior to a jury of my peers.

[1] Or whatever your client calls the mode where you don't seed the torrent.

Why in leech mode? I agree with you that you'd be morally ok by paying for HBO to consume the content, but I'd say you're morally wrong for leeching without seeding. If you want to participate in the network, you should take and give.

The "giving" is the illegal part.

So is the taking. But we’ve already decided that it’s morally ok to break that law.

Without the givers, no one can take. That's why they pursue the uploaders with the most fervor.

Supply-side economics.

I remember having HBO now for a while and it seemed fine. I just got rid of it because Netflix has much more content, and the price point was a bit unjustified IMO. Does HBO Now have all of HBO content or is it just a subset?

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