Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

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I used to shout the name of HBO from the housetops, as they always had something to keep me paying up each month, even if it were only the one show. After the latest acquisition (who is it this week? Warner?), throwing in all the Discover crap, et al., in addition to not having a show we want to watch, we finally just cancelled what used to be HBO streaming. Customer from Day One, and they lost me. The last straw was when I went to go finish the final season of West World and...now I can't. WTF, HBO? Used to be you could watch the entire back catalog (Six Feet Under was, what, 25 years ago?). Now I can't finish the final season of a show that was released in the last couple of years.

Netflix: if T-Mobile didn't pay most of the sub, we'd cancel. We've certainly subscribed to their streaming since the first day, and we were very early to the DVD mailing service. But with little content of interest lately, they are about to lose an early subscriber, too.

We sub to Paramount once a year to binge various Star Treks, then cancel.

The only month-to-month sub we keep is Apple TV+, which is to us the new HBO: they always have at least one show we want to watch. And, like the HBO of old, if it's on Apple TV it's probably good. Might not be to our tastes, but it's probably a good production.

When cable TV came out, there were three compelling improvements over broadcast TV.

The picture was excellent, no interference from over-the-air broadcast conditions.

There were no commercials, naturally, or what would have been the point to begin with?

Plus it was not regulated by the FCC.

It's no surprise without these incentives, people have been looking elsewhere for quite some time.

Then when HBO came out, cable was still in its younger stages.

HBO did not have enough material licensed to fill up a weekly schedule at all. It was only full-length movies to begin with, that's why they called it Home Box Office. They only ran a handful of movies a week, repeated often according to a published schedule. It was pretty cool since you could watch the end of a movie later in the week in case you didn't finish it the first time it showed. Watch the whole thing a few times if you wanted.

It was accepted that HBO was just starting out, and they said eventually they would have full weeks of programming, and that the often-repeating short playlist would eventually be filled with different movies all week or at least one day at a time.

That turned out to be false.

Before they even got to a half-full schedule, additional content then began to appear on an additional new channel called HBO2.

Which you could subscribe to in addition to "regular" HBO.

What's the issue with Westworld anyway? It's their own content. It should be the last thing they'd remove from the catalog.

It's residuals for performers and music. They assumed they can make more money from licensing it to other streamers and have them pay the costs.

Netflix has Six Feet Under now :)

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