Hacker News Reader

Comment by pwthornton | Hacker News Reader

HBO is owned by Time Warner. That's why they say these crazy things and make their content so hard for people to view. Time Warner wants to protect their cable business at all costs.

If HBO were independent you wouldn't see these stupid comments. It's in HBO's best interests to get their content seen by as many people as possible. That, however, is not in the best interest of Time Warner.

HBO Go is largely a joke. Not only does it require a cable subscription, it can't be used on the go. There is no offline caching of shows and to stream shows it requires a pretty strong connection: http://interchangeproject.org/2012/05/10/why-is-hbo-go-not-a...

View on HN

Time Warner Cable is actually not owned by Time Warner, which is exclusively (or getting there) a content company.

The issue here is actually that the cable companies (TWC included, now as one of many clients of Time Warner's) provide huge dollars in a lump sum kind of way. The internet is still not a proven business model for distributing shows profitably.

While I agree with others in this thread that an a la carte model is the correct one and would likely work, there is very little middle ground for them (HBO, TW etc.) in between selling their shows to cable companies and going completely independent and distributing through the internet. As soon as they start doing that the cable companies will stop paying for their shows, and then at best there will be a long period of time while people switch over to consuming everything over the internet. Imagine how long it's going to take IE8 to disappear due to the fact that you can't upgrade to IE9+ w/o Vista+. Now imagine the upgrade I have to do is swapping out a cable box for a computer. Will you survive that gap, or will cable companies, wanting to continue to capitalize on the networks they've built, simply replace your content with someone else's?

This doesn't sound right. Shady sites that do nothing but provide ads for illegal downloads (e.g. megaupload) make tons of freakin' money and its not even legit. The problem seems like they half ass this stuff.

I mean if they're going to charge me $5 to watch a mediocre movie i'm going to pay them precisely $0 a week. If they charge me $1 to watch a movie I will probably watch 5 movies a week which gets them 5 of my bucks. They just need to go all in and stop messing around.

I think you fundamentally misunderstand the scale at which TW operates compared to a site like megaupload.

When we were subscribing I was able to use HBO Go fine on 4G (TMobile, Seattle area).

My bugaboo in this area is international football. Getting Premier League games in the states is a real pain. I'm sure there's equally entrenched interests there.

F1 in the UK is split between BBC (free[1] terrestrial) and Sky Sports (non free, satellite).

You can't just buy the sports, you have to buy a bunch of other stuff to get the sports. It's very annoying.

[1] You need a tv licence if you use a TV as a TV, even if you never make use of BBC content.

To clarify, the issue isn't so much that it won't work at all, it's that you won't get good vide quality over a slower connection. For instance, I'm traveling for a week, and will have hotel wifi. Game of Thrones will look pixelated on my third-gen iPad. That's not exactly the kind of experience I'm looking for.

In contrast, I purchased the latest episode of Sherlock in 1080p for this trip. It looks amazing on the iPad, and I'll be able to watch it on the plane or anywhere else.

If this thread is still active, I'll report back tonight on how HBO Go works on my hotel's wifi. If HBO Go would just let me cache a few shows this wouldn't be an issue.

And forget about watching any of these episodes on my plane flight.

Maybe I'm asking too much from an app with Go in the name.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com