“Apple Inc. is in negotiations to start carrying Time Warner Inc.’s HBO Go application on Apple TV by mid-2013, according to two people familiar with the plans,” Edmund Lee and Adam Satariano report for Bloomberg. “Cable and satellite subscribers who pay for HBO will be able to watch more than 600 hours of films and television shows on Apple TV, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private.”
“HBO Go is only available to customers who subscribe to the network through their cable or satellite service, and would be the first app on Apple TV that requires pay-TV authentication,” Lee and Satariano report. “There are currently HBO Go apps for the iPad and iPhone.”
Lee and Satariano report, “Apple sold more than 2 million set-top boxes in the first quarter of its 2013 fiscal year, which ended in December. Over the two prior fiscal years Apple sold more than 7.8 million.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related article:
Home Box Office releases HBO GO app for Apple iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch – April 29, 2011
That’s ridiculous. Of course, this is not an affront to apple, I think it’s great they may be adding the service. But I do not want to pay for cable tv! I already pay for Internet. This is nonsensical.
Can you take your cable service with everywhere you go? Is your able contract mobile?
Can you watch the superbowl live with added information like slowmo’s and stats in the stadium?
If you can, you are a man my son! If not, then think of it as an internet portal to a service you do not have on the ground in a stadium environment.
You do have a choice though, whatever your choice is… great is that choice for you, let no one tell you otherwise.
Blurgh!!! Can you take your cable service with you everywhere you go? Is your cable contract……
I have The Simpson’s finger syndrome today! Three fingers and one thumb!! 🙂
HBO is not going to piss off their cash-cows (cable and satellite) just to grab a few hundred-thousand customers.
You are already an HBO subscriber, through your cable company, so you’re not pissing them off.
My reply was to Thundervolt who I believe was implying he wants to be able to get HBO sans a cable (video) subscription.
Yes, or at least have the option.
And it will eventually come to that…in about 5 years or so. The business model is evolving, so don’t look for HBO to jump too fast and lose more money than they have already to declining sub numbers and NetFlix, etc.
+1000
+1000
We are Comcast free and will remain so.
Apple needs to become the the new combo platter versus cable and satellite. Please “Think Different” and create it.
Comcast market cap at 103.7 billion.
Or, Time Warner, Inc (48.27B) + Viacom (29.57B) gets you all of them plus HBO with a whole lot of change left over for building TV sets 😉
When you have $137B in your bank the menu of content providers and distributors just looks like a seven-course meal.
http://www.google.com/finance?q=twx
Or controlling interest in Disney for about $50B. That gets them Pixar, Touchstone, Buena Vista, The Disney Channel, ABC and its subsidiary, ESPN. Think what would happen to cable and satellite if ESPN was yanked from their schedules and became available only on Apple TV.
This appears to be absurd on its face. This would only be worthwhile if one could pay for HBO shows individually (or by season) through an HBO app on Apple TV. Otherwise, if I already subscribe to HBO (which I do), why would I want to watch it through ATV rather than just through my regular HBO (other than when “on the go” thru the HBO app already on my iPad)? The HBO app on ATV as describe here is pointless.
“This appears to be absurd on its face.”
Yup. And so did the rumors that surfaced in 2006 about Apple being in talks with mobile phone carriers. Look how that turned out: It wasn’t just about making a better phone.
I doubt my house is all that representative but I have a single HDTV in my family room, and it is serviced by HD cable box. In another room I have a projector and 90″ drop down screen. There’s no HD cable box in there – the house predates the mandated switch to digital broadcast TV, so there’s a cable converter box there, but all you get are the analog channels. With HBO Go on Apple TV I could watch HBO in full quality on my big screen without having to rent another HD cable box. And while I could use AirPlay from my iPad to my AppleTV, then the iPad is tied up.
Because you could then easily watch everything HBO has on demand when you want to without having to deal with your cable providers crappy “on demand” service, or having to record everything to your DVR. THE HBO Go app on my iPad has FAR more content available than Comcast’s on demand service does, so I’d welcome this addition. It’s not like I’m going to be paying anything extra for it since I already subscribe to HBO anyway.
Yes, this is good news because it will provide deep access to the HBO archive with all the convenience of the Netflix ATV app. And with the iPad “Remote” app, we’ll be able to search HBO easily — one less reason to pick up the awful Comcast remote.
I wish all of the channel providers would do that. I don’t watch HBO go on my iPad that often, but when I do, I enjoy being able to search what I want to watch when I want to watch it, instead of either waiting for the movie to come on or using the DVR.
In a perfect world, I’d send $3.99 each month to HBO for HBO go on any device, without having to subscribe to a cable or satelite service. But in the mean time, i’d be happy to have it on my Apple tv in conjunction with my uVerse service.
It”s not TW’s HBOGO but HBOGO available for HBO subscribers on a number of different cable systems.
“HBO Go is only available to customers who subscribe to the network through their cable or satellite service, and would be the first app on Apple TV that requires pay-TV authentication”
Deal-breaker as long as this applies…HBO services aren’t worth that cost to me. I dropped cable 2.5 years ago and haven’t looked back. The money I saved goes into my “mad money” and has been enjoyed ever since.
This makes sense in two ways
1 – for cable subscribers with HBO and an Apple TV, they get convenient access to HBO on demand content.
2 – If (more likely when) HBO starts to offer subscriptions without cable, the app and set top box will be ready to go.
Do you really think that Apple will just add the non-cable HBO option to the software and not insist that you buy a new Apple TV set top box? Dream on. That change will be a huge and costly moment in program distribution, and people will have to pay for it in a number of ways.
It may take a while, but Cable TV subscriptions are dying. Video on demand over the Internet is the future. People are going to get tired of paying their monthly bills for Cable TV, and deem it nonessential as long as they have high speed Internet. And while cable TV is dying, HBO doesn’t have to go down with the ship. HBO can live on as on online video provider.
It really doesn’t really matter if HBO works on the same model of Apple TV that’s available today. The point I was making is this – on the day HBO does sell their service without a cable, HBO can tell their subscribers that they don’t need a cable box anymore – replace it with a $99 Apple TV box and an HBO subscription (and they might even subsidize the box).