CNet’s headline suggests HBO Go is a Netflix rival. But:
Unless you are one of the 38 million cable subscribers who gets HBO or sister service Cinemax, HBO Go won’t be offered to you, the company has said. HBO Go provides subscribers Web access to the same movies HBO screens on cable TV–at no extra charge. This is the on-demand movie provider’s attempt to hang on to subscribers during a down economy, as Netflix and other Web video services attract more and more consumers looking to reduce entertainment costs.
Its one-up on Netflix is access to the newer titles that HBO pays big bucks for. But TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld’s first look warns Curb Your Enthusiasm:
The choice of shows and movies is just not that great. You can watch every episode of The Wire, and the final season of The Sopranos, but not one episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. You get a lot more in your cable subscription, especially if you get multiple HBO channels. The on-demand option is great, but essentially HBO Go is competing with much broader array of choices on the TV which can also be made on-demand through a DVR. There are some movies like The Watchmen and Taken, which I think I’ve already seen three times each this month on TV, and a spattering of older archived movies like Canadian Bacon, but for the most part the selection is worse than what you get on Netflix via its streaming option. I’m not sure I want to see The Chumscrubber in HD.
And for those of you living in a post-cable future, HBO GO is a great big NO GO. Nick Bilton at NYTimes Bits:
I canceled cable last year and haven’t looked back since. Although the vast majority of Americans still pay a cable or satellite TV operator a monthly fee to watch their favorite TV shows, a small segment of viewers have thrown away their cable boxes and chosen Web-based services like Hulu, iTunes from Apple and the streaming videos on Netflix.
Eric Kessler, a president of HBO, said the company was not offering the HBO GO service to attract a new audience. Instead, it hoped to extend its relationship with its current audience. “We’re a subscription service, and our ongoing overarching objective is to enhance the service to make it better,” Mr. Kessler said. “It’s about enhancing the satisfaction and continuing the life cycle of the subscriber.”
A Forrester analyst says HBO could “flip a switch” at some future date and enable an online-only video subscription. Bilton says they should have done it up front:
I would’ve been willing to pay $15 or $20 a month for HBO content online, and I bet others would, too. HBO is choosing its partners of the present over its customers of the future.
Mashable’s Ben Parr thinks making parts of the site ad supported would have been a better way to go. As it is, what the service boils down to is watching the cablecast offerings via computer, without many of the benefits of the web. The biggest of those is the long tail of all HBO’s offerings, new and old, available everywhere. HBO GO is all Flash — so not even available on an iPad or iPhone.
I’m sticking with Netflix.
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