Kodak knew how to make money. Everyone thought they knew better - and they were right.
But: I said it snippily, and ineffectively. I apologize.
Snippy happens, given a soundbite-oriented medium. No prob. You want room 12A, just along the corridor.
This is nonsense and a horrible analogy. HBO is perfectly suited for the the future you envision. They have a digital streaming infrastructure in place to make the transition they just don't yet have the business case.
The reason the analogy fails is because HBO isn't a medium. Its the content - ask Netflix how easy it is to make a living streaming mediocre video content. Switching to a different distribution mechanism is trivial but for now they're not going to cut off their nose to spite their face just because a tiny subset of subscribers are moving away from cable.
I think that's the biggest part that goes missing in these discussions. Yeah, it's annoying that the moment that they require you to go through a tv provider, but I can see why they wouldn't want to alienate a large revenue source right now.
That said, it's pretty significant that they're building up their streaming infrastructure in the first place. The day will come when cable providers aren't worth cozying up to anymore, and it might even be sooner than HBO thinks. However, if they have everything in place it's going to be a lot easier to push out an update allowing web only customers than it would be to build their streaming service from scratch.
It remains to be seen, of course, how they will make that transition. It's arguable, though, that they aren't nearly as unprepared as some people are making them out to be.
HBO is obviously making moves towards this transition, but the numbers probably just aren't there yet to justify taking the full plunge. It looks to me like they're hedging their bets. Netflix's biggest challenge is content, right? When the time comes, I don't think that's going to be a problem for HBO.
Or, maybe their C-levels are just bailing water on the old model. But I kinda doubt it.
HBO I'm sure has more people working on how to make the company profitable than there are comments in this discussion. There's some entitlement floating around here masked as "better ideas". I have no doubt that HBO wants to make paying for their content as easy as possible but...
* they might have done the math and found this way to be more profitable, losses to piracy be damned
* it takes a lot of different entities to make a show like Game of Thromes and you better believe that there are pre-existing contracts galore. These pre-existing agreements may be what's keeping the situation as it is now
If scenario 1 is correct then that's just tough for us. We'll have to wait or pirate. If we pirate then HBO probably doesn't care anyway or they wouldn't have made watching GoT so damn hard.
If scenario 2 is correct then we're placing blame and frustration in the wrong place. At the same time this scenario can vindicate popular opinion around here too.
Whatever the case may be, I sincerely doubt HBO doesn't know what they're doing. They absolutely cannot be so incompetent as to not understand that making it impossible to pay for the show will drive people to piracy. As for inconveniencing current customers, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they had a deal with Dish and Cable companies and expected all boxes to be replaced by the time they made this change in their broadcasting.
I could be wrong but if HBO truly doesn't get it my head might just explode.