Up until now the ongoing will-they-won’t they saga of HBO bringing its service a la carte to the internet has mostly existed only in the eyes of viewers. To HBO chief Jeff Bewkes the story has been clear the whole time: They won’t. He even suggested last year that he didn’t care if HBO cable customers shared their HBO GO passwords .. http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/196919/sharing-an-hbo-go-password-could-land-you-in-jail/ .. with friends, cannibalizing what could be the untold millions or billions that the online subscription model brings in for competitors like Netflix. That’s how important it was to keep HBO GO bundled in cable.
Many of you have asked it. And we ask it all the time and are always looking at it. What we’ve basically been doing, we’re looking at the market. We’ve been looking at our ability to service customers and our distributors. And basically up until now, it looked to us as though the best and main opportunity was to focus on improving the penetration, the offering, the servicing, the interface, the monetization of HBO through the existing affiliate system. And part of the reason for that was, first of all, there were some real places of opportunity and underperformers there. Secondly, the broadband-only opportunity up until now wasn’t again looked to us to be really at the point where it would be smart to move the focus from one to the other. So now the broadband opportunity is getting quite a bit bigger, and the ability of the plant to deliver something robust is getting stronger; and so the question you’re asking is becoming more viable, more interesting. What we’re trying to do is basically make sure that we’ve done everything we can with our distributors to take advantage and have them take advantage of what customers they could have. And we’ve got to keep looking actively. We’re seriously considering what is the best way to deal with online distribution, but I don’t have anything to announce about it today.
Of course, amid all these complicated models of monetization and affiliate partnership a simpler truth seems evident: HBO GO is owned by Time Warner. The major cable providers have been hemorrhaging cable customers in recent years. Comcast and Time Warner Cable lost a combined 1.1 million customers .. http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/comcast-and-time-warner-cable-lost-1-1-million-video-customers-in-2013/ .. in 2013. Forcing customers into watching HBO on their cable boxes may be one of the few things keeping people there. If Time Warner puts HBO GO online they might make money hand over fist, but they’ll lose it just as fast from the cable box side of their business.
However ultimately it seems like an inevitability. Eventually all things media go online, period, and for a fraction of what they used to cost offline. There are no two ways around it, and Bewkes seems to know it. Those clamoring for HBO GO online may have to wait a big longer, but the time is getting closer.
YUP, i was silly to think i could watch it live .. so the one before will have to do .. lol ..
Real Time With Bill Maher: Overtime - Episode #327 (HBO)
Yeah! "Atheists tend to be ethicists. We don't believe that goodness is going, you know, uh, should be anything but for the sake of itself. We don't think our ass is going to be saved because we have faith. We have to actually make our ethics in this world." Applause in video and in Australia. Well put, Bill.
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