I understand that HBO has some sort of proprietary online video watching service, but speaking as someone with no TV and no desire to pay for basic cable merely to enable my paying for HBO, I do with HBO would take Gabe's quote to heart.
That doesn't make piracy OK, but it certainly makes it a lot easier for many people to justify.
What about Japanese shows?
For example: Bakemonogatari was aired in 2010. It is available in DVD in Japanese (maybe Korean/Chinese). In 2012 there is still no official English/Spanish/Russian/other release.
But there are a lot of fan translations. So, piracy is only way.
The concept of releasing in different parts of the world at different times is outdated. Release worldwide all at once.
But it's not that simple. HBO isn't a worldwide network. They need to make deals with lots of different networks in different countries and that takes time. Those networks then need to fit the show into their schedules.
National networks are similarly outdated. This is the 21st Century, for crying out loud.
If a bunch of kids can propagate high quality 1080i/720p copies of television broadcasts around the world literally within half an hour of the show airing in its native market, the content owners themselves can manage the same.
How moral is it for someone in one territory to buy from a different territory? Because, to the business, that's just as bad as pirating. Which is why you can only change the region on your DVD player (Apple, MS) 5 times, and why there are laws preventing shops telling people how to make their DVD machine region free.
From last year, a rhetorical imagined response from HBO: http://www.livedigitally.com/2011/12/22/dear-mg-a-note-from-...
> We love that you’d spend $19.99 (or more) to pay for our service, and we wish we could have you as a customer. But let’s talk about that for a second. First of all, we don’t have any direct relationship with our fans right now, so when you need customer service, you call Comcast or DirecTV or Cox, etc. So we’d need to get customer service up and running, and that’s pricey, since, as you know, we’d want our service to be top notch.
> ...But let’s get to the crux of the issue. There are about 30-40 million Americans who watch HBO shows legally, and we agree, a lot of them would be happy to pay us directly. If we went, as you put it, “cable-optional,” we’d be breaking our existing, mega-million-dollar contracts with our current partners, and from what we’ve seen, they wouldn’t be too happy about that. Second, we don’t really know how they’d change their billing relationship with you or other consumers. Which is going to put a lot of people into a precarious position of having to decide if they really do want to sign up with us and keep paying their cable bill.
Amazon's Prime Instant is a direct Netflix competitor and they pursue licenses just as aggressively. They are even publiahing original content, which is not their core competency but certainly is HBO's.
Kodak said exactly the same thing about digital photography vs retail film sales. The then-$17B/yr company just this month sold their remaining essence for $0.5B.
Remember who your actual customers are.
To which my response is, "Welcome to the local maximum, HBO. Make yourself comfortable, as you'll be here a while."