How is HBO consumer-hostile?
When it did work it would take about 5 minutes of futzing around. I couldn't watch it from firefox or google chrome running on my linux box.
The client would hang fairly often, I'd end up resetting my roku to clear it.
Netflix does it right. Auth lasts a long time (at least a year), the client is generally pretty reliable, and I can watch from Linux, Roku, or Android as I see fit. I can even download episodes on Android if I want to save on bandwidth charges.
While Netflix isn't perfect, it does seem way less consumer hostile than HBO.