If you are at all like me, you enjoy getting into bed with Bill Maher once a week.
Let me rephrase that: You enjoy getting into bed to watch some “Real Time with Bill Maher.” For me it is a regular habit, a hobby perhaps, but nevertheless a comforting routine brought to fruition by piggybacking off a dear friend’s HBO GO account. “Piggybacking” — or simply borrowing — is when people use a friend’s product or service largely because of an inability, or disinclination, to pay for it on their own.
HBO has been a tireless constant in my trajectory through higher education, and undoubtedly the chief catalyst in my steadfast desire to procrastinate at least a total of three days a week. However, news has emerged in the last week that could change my relationship with HBO.
HBO, which is owned by Time Warner Inc., has announced that in the early half of 2015, the company will launch a stand-alone streaming service, unsurprisingly modeled after successful media purveyors Netflix and Hulu.
HBO, which has to date required a cable subscription (unless you had a generous neighbor and several yards of cable cord to spare), typically remained out of reach for many households that failed to stretch their entertainment budget far enough. The advent of HBO GO, allowing HBO subscribers to choose from a cornucopia of television treasures on demand, slightly pierced the curtain dividing basic cable subscribers like me from those who could obtain a first-class experience (well-written content that’s on demand).
Let’s be honest, there are probably more Brunonians who piggyback onto a friend or family member’s HBO GO account than there are Brunonians who actually pay for the subscription. Even Time Warner’s CEO made the comment in 2013 that this phenomenon wasn’t necessarily a bad thing — going so far as to comment that the mass pirating of “Game of Thrones” was more beneficial for the series than any Emmy. HBO’s announcement has the potential to change this easy access we have come to take for granted.
This breakthrough in sans-cable streaming will touch us all, whether you and your date are looking to catch one of the latest movies to leave theaters, you want to engage in a major binge session of “Girls,” you are looking for a good documentary, or you just want to hear Lewis Black tell it like it is.
Yet this seismic shift for HBO has already begun to attract criticism. To nobody’s surprise, cable provider Comcast essentially said, “Good luck with that Internet thing!” A spokesman for Cox Communications — my personal provider — dodged the announcement and reiterated that its broadband infrastructure will still be the system providing content at the end of the day. On the other hand, just one day following the HBO announcement, CBS rode the coattails and announced they too would be launching a stand-alone streaming service available to subscribers at a point in the near future.
This is the point where I wonder aloud about which direction our valued HBO GO will go. If you are like me, prolonged exposure to services such as HBO GO and Netflix — on which I also piggyback a subscription — has rendered you highly impatient with any sort of marketing effort. The few times I have attempted to follow up on a good “Saturday Night Live” skit or even just attempted to view an NBC News clip, my MacBook and I were immediately drowning in a parade of the latest pharmaceutical commercials or GPS-synchronized political ads.
It is maddening. It is typical of most media consumption. However, commercials have never reached the realm of HBO. HBO still remains one of the few sacred ad-free havens left in this world, reminiscent of the days of an ad-free Facebook experience. This is not a Halloween scare, but simply a question of where we devout HBO GO loyalists stand. Comcast Executive Vice President Stephen Burke pointed out in an interview that the transition HBO seeks will require a degree of “cannibalization” of already existing customers in the name of bringing new customers into the fold.
Will the target burnt-out cable customers looking to disengage from their monthly bill? Or will this new service come in a different form — perhaps changing HBO GO from a cable subscription companion to an additional subscription feature? If my friend’s parents suddenly have to pay an extra fee for HBO GO on top of their excessive cable bill, will they pay that excess? If they don’t, the show’s over for me, and for everyone else currently piggybacking.
Granted, paying a fair market rate for an HBO GO subscription is not the end of the world. At one point, I paid for Netflix before discovering the joy of piggybacking. We all attend Brown to perhaps afford such luxuries in the future. But in paying for a product, one also holds expectations of that product’s guarantee of benefit. Still wary from Netflix’s 2013 disappointment, in which thousands of titles were pulled due to licensing expirations, I will always consider Netflix second-rate.
I applaud HBO’s decision to enter stand-alone streaming, but I fear for it at the same time. I do not have all the facts, but I, like so many others, have come to find a special place in life for HBO GO. But what subscription fees will we all face? Will there be advertisements? Will the same titles remain?
My fellow columnist Sam Hillestad ’15 wrote in a Herald column last Tuesday lashing 257 Thayer that Brown students “don’t need an HBO subscription.” We don’t need HBO, but we have it — and we certainly want to keep it.
Ian Kenyon GS is an MPA candidate and HBO GO loyalist. He can be reached at ian_kenyon@brown.edu when he is not watching something on HBO.
ADVERTISEMENT
