HBO is finally going to let you watch its shows without cable
theverge.com
theverge.com
So I am excited about this, and will subscribe as soon as it is available. I'll get to catch up on Game of Thrones now!
I do still supplement my NBA League Pass with viewing of unauthorized streams for games that are not aired on League Pass.
The public has decided to revoke their privilege. If Congress hasn't codified that revocation, then this is a problem with Congress and not with the public.
Fuck em.
So?
It's real simple: copyright is not a fundamental human right. It is a privilege granted by the public to creators for specific purpose, and if the public feels that purpose is subverted, or even if they just are in a shitty mood, the privilege can and should be revoked.
I don't understand your attitude. You seem to equate "people not paying" with theft, which sounds like something a small child would come up with. HBO hasn't paid me squat... are they stealing from me?
>so how is it that the "public" owns it?
This too is simple. If I own land, and I lease it to you for 75 years (you pay up front), who owns it?
I do. You still do not own it. You can do (most) anything you want with the land, you can use it to make a profit by using that land... but at the end of 75 years, you still have to surrender that land back to me.
Copyright works like this. Have you never heard of the goddamned public domain? What do you think that was, exactly? The public owns the work. The copyright holder only has a temporary interest in the work. It's like you've never bothered to think about any of this. You just swallow all the bullshit anyone shovels into your gullet.
I've concluded there were a few benefits HBO got from their close relationship with cable companies: 1) The huge customer base that cable companies have 2) The advertising that cable companies provide 3) The distribution of content that cable companies provide
I always felt the release of content to Amazon Prime was an experiment and judging by this news, I think that experiment was deemed a success. I suspect that HBO concluded that Amazon is more than capable of distributing the content and that there are plenty of customers willing to pay for it when it's delivered by a means other than the cable company.
I still suspect that Amazon will play a role in hosting and distributing content for whatever "HBO Go" becomes one year from now.
For example, I'd love to pay AMC Networks[0], A&E Networks[1], or NBC Universal[2] a nominal monthly fee to access their catalogs on-demand.
While it's true that these networks stream some of their current shows online, the players and streaming experience is usually very terrible.
That's how I want to the future to be: everything is like Netflix or HBO-sans-cable. Maybe even eliminate, or at least reduce commercials.
And it's not exactly a-la-carte, because most channels aren't individual networks. And most shows are perfectly suited for on-demand viewing. There are very few things I watch that are actually "broadcast" live (news and sports are pretty much it). All I'm suggesting is that we bypass the cable companies and pay the publishers directly for content. I'd pay good money to an Internet Service Provider who gives me a fast and stable connection to the publisher's servers.
The flip side of all this choice is that it's no longer dead-simple for consumers. It sure is convenient to simply pay Comcast $100 a month and they take care of getting all of these networks and publishers into my home in one box with one remote control. Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon apps are fairly ubiquitous on pretty much every platform including built right into many TVs. I doubt traditional TV networks want to invest in that technology.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMC_Networks
The single-service cost of any one of the most popular services will likely approach or exceed the cost of a typical cable subscription while providing far less (but more focussed) content.
1) the broadcaster is a step removed from the cable operator (though with all the mergers in the content/delivery space, they might be part of the same parent company). If Netflix develops a new show like House of Cards, they know exactly how many people watched it for how long, etc.
A cable company might track what station their customers are watching but unless they are reporting that back to the broadcaster it won't change programming in the near-term. It may make the cable company make different decisions about their lineup but such decisions are often part of many-year contracts with forced bundling (eg. Disney saying you must carry all these stations if you want ESPN) so even if they do have data I doubt it has much impact.
2) The cable company can know what channel your settop box is tuned to, but a lot of people have setups where the cable box is essentially always on (and only the TV is switched off) and there is no reasonable way for the cable operator to know if anyone is actively watching or not without resorting to very imprecise heuristics like only counting it if the channel has recently been changed.
This is unlike Netflix, et al, which have less passive interfaces where you can be more reasonably sure that if the user started some content they are actually watching it and not streaming it to a TV set that is off.
1) There's obviously a lot more separation here, but it's worth noting that there is a lot of data out there available to broadcasters that doesn't come from Nielsen, such as broadcasters licensing data that comes initially from cable providers. The number of set top boxes here dwarfs the size of the Nielsen data set.
2) You can get more precise if you want. At a basic level, you can look at a lot more options than just changing the channel. You can also train models based on the overlap with something like Nielsen where you have more information about when they are watching. If you can match up comcast data to Nielsen data, you can build a model for active vs. inactive boxes on the comcast data.
3) To backtrack a bit, the fact that Nielsen is a "very small subset" as you said a couple of comments ago is relevant for some things but not others. For the broadcast network prime time shows, it's certainly a big enough sample to see which shows are popular among what demographics without having the level of detailed information that Netflix or cable operators have.
All in all, I agree with you that there is more separation and it is harder to use, but there's still a key distinction between Nielsen, which is in something like <~0.1% of homes and the other data sources which are many times larger. They don't all seek it out, but it's possible for broadcasters to acquire the sort of data necessary to answer questions about content popularity like Netflix can consider.
Also, having all the video in a choose-it-myself format avoids droning out in front of the TV for hours just watching commercials and reruns. And getting it over an IP network means a lot. Hello logging! Hello filtering per MAC around homework time!
There's plenty of wiggle room here for HBO, and because it's more a la carte, I could easily drop a couple of things there once I have HBO.
Not sure what they'd charge for standalone HBO yet, but I think it could be as much as $50 a month and I'd still come out ahead (especially if I dropped something). I got rid of comcast a while ago. As I recall, if you get the minimum level of cable service required for HBO plus specific surcharge for HBO and your internet service through them, I think it's was over $120 a year… I know I'm being vague, but that's largely because comcast doesn't really want to make it easy to figure out what things cost, though, and you can play various games (threaten to quit and get a deal that they hope you won't notice when it expires)… but they weasel right back and get you on all kinds of little things, though, so you have to pay close attention to your bill.
Also, every now and then comcast will tell you to return something like a cable box, and then claim you haven't returned it, and send you a letter threatening your credit history if you don't pay for not returning it even though you have, and then ask you why you're quitting. So you have to factor in that extra cost too.
http://www.amazon.com/Greetings-Set-Season-5/dp/B00NI1VFYI/r...
Good way to watch the one or two shows you want from some of these networks. Although its not an all access plan to every show you can atleast watch the latest.
Welcome to the present, HBO. I am assuming this move is in part to the massively high piracy rate for Game of Thrones episodes. As an Australian resident with no real access to current episodes of Game of Thrones without getting cable TV, I hope they do come through on delivering the service overseas (especially Australia), because if the price is right, I will gladly pay for HD episodes of Game of Thrones (amongst other great HBO shows like True Detective).
That's the same situation as USA.
Australia actually briefly had it better than USA, with the AU iTunes store releasing HBO shows like GoT within a day or two of their USA cable release. But then HBO + Foxtel broke that.
How to stop piracy:
1. Create great content
2. Make it easy to buy
3. Same day global release
4. Works on any device
5. Fair price
https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/06/19HBO-GO-WatchESPN-...
To access HBO GO℠, you must reside within the fifty states of the United States of America.There is very little reason to pirate TV in Sweden today, I think the only major shows you can't get are AMC's.
"This service will be offered in the United States and there are also plans to bring it overseas."
Especially considering outside of the US where the choice is: pirate it or don't watch it.
It seems silly to just leave those money on the floor, even if 90% of the people will still pirate content.
that probably means no DRM
Maybe with something like video games it can net a few extra days of sales before torrents go online, but ripping music and video is so simple. In that case, DRM is just a joke that makes the executives and lawyers happy, wastes money and time developing, and can cause trouble for the consumer.
Hulu is the only thing I would like to replace... I have no tolerance for ads... I'd pay more to get rid of them. I don't know how anyone watches regular tv (unless it's with a DVR).
Anyhow, if HBO starts selling their content directly, that's going to give them some leverage for better terms with MSOs.
I am assuming that if they did open it up globally, they would not be able to sell the shows for as much money to other networks.
That said, subtitling from English is fairly cheap, especially at the current level of quality, so there's no reason to avoid it.
This service will be offered in the United States and there are also plans to bring it overseasMy personal conclusion is that the money would have been better spent just gradually building up my own library. And, were it closer, in supporting my local library.
In other words: Too little, too late, for me.
I tried to find a legal download of Bladerunner the other day, and got the following:
1) Amazon.com geofenced it
2) Google Play won't let me download it (I have "bought" movies on Google Play before, but like any digital play-for-now service they will eventually become unavailable to me: I will no longer buy digital content I can't rip to an open format, because temporary proprietary access is not what I'm looking for.)
3) iTunes doesn't have it
4) Amazon.ca doesn't do digital downloads of films, near as I can tell. They certainly didn't have the one I was looking for.
All I want to be able to do is pay for a legal digital copy of a film, and I can't. I can buy a piece of plastic with the bits burned into it that I have no device to play, but that's a ridiculous waste.
I didn't torrent the film... I just ended up saying, "Screw it. No sale for me."
Business 101: make it easy for customers to give you money.
This is something that digital streaming companies (other than Netflix) have not mastered.
Now Bell will likely make some concessions to prevent complete Canadian public outrage, but whatever the US gets, I'm sure the Canadian version will have a few drawbacks added to the existing ones in the US service.
For the time being, for anyone with Amazon Prime, the HBO collection isn't bad: http://www.amazon.com/b?node=9097393011
It's not nearly as complete or up-to-date as HBO go of course, but it has lot of the most popular shows.
We have HBO go and actually use Amazon prime to watch HBO shows since Comcast has yet to support logging into HBO go on PS3.
This is a step in the right direction. Comcast and Verizon must be quaking in their boots because as more networks decide to go the direct distribution route, the less necessary their TV distribution services will become.
This is the beginning of the end for cable. And hopefully also for propaganda stations like Fox News.
Fixed.
The only thing that will keep me away is if the price is a lot more expensive than the $14 a month I a currently paying for HBO.
Given that the only thing I wanted cable for was HBO, that meant I would be paying $72/month for HBO. A little rich. My over/under is probably around $30/month.