HBO Goes Rogue, Announces Plans for Stand-Alone Streaming Service

Today HBO announced that, in 2015, they will launch their very own stand-alone web streaming service that will provide access to their premium content without a cable or satellite subscription.

We don't know how much it will cost yet, and much of that depends on whether they make this a true first-run streaming service or a kind of "HBO Go Plus" where you just get to watch old content on demand. But either way, this is a pretty big deal. Right now there are a lot of people who only subscribe to cable for HBO and sports, so cable companies stand to lose a lot of subscribers.

That being said, don't go celebrating the end of cable just yet. Keep in mind that HBO is owned by Time Warner, a cable company. And while this is an obvious attempt by Time Warner to free itself from the shackles of its cable competitors and appeal to the estimated 10 million broadband-only households in America, they're not exactly ditching the cable model. Time Warner is still a major opponent of net neutrality who wants streaming services like Netflix to pay extra for the bandwidth their customers use. And that is still major bullshit.

In the end, Time Warner is trying to have its cake and eat it too. They want to screw over streaming services and broadband customers so people keep paying crazy money for cable. But they also want to appeal to people who are dying to ditch cable altogether.

Sounds like an existential crisis is brewing.

[via Washington Post]