HBO Go finally comes to Time Warner Cable, but still useless

Dan Seitz Contributing Writer, Tech

It’s pretty bad when your first reaction to a service announcement is “Hooray!” immediately followed by “Oh, come on, seriously?” But at least there’s partial good news. If you’re a Time Warner subscriber with HBO, you will finally be able to access HBO Go on your computer, which includes iPads. You just won’t be able to use it on your TV in any sort of convenient way.

As you may have guessed, HBO Go will not be coming to any sort of home streaming platform outside of your cable box, which means all you Roku owners can just go screw yourselves. But, hey, if you want to watch movies on your iPad, here’s yet another app to do that, since Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, CinemaNow and Lord only knows what else weren’t nearly enough.

It’s frustrating because HBO takes one step forward, two steps back: recently, all their current shows stopped being available to rent from Amazon Instant Video…but they started selling their back catalogue for reasonable prices. “The Wire”, for example, only costs $18 or so a season on Instant, meaning you can finally watch it somewhat quickly and cheaply and get everybody off your ass about how you haven’t seen “the greatest show on television ever”.

But then, that defines HBO Go. It’s a step forward, a major network running its own subscription app, but two steps backward in that it requires you to have cable and subscribe to HBO to even get access to it.

Hey, HBO! There’s this amazing thing called an “online subscription video service” that people use! It’s where they pay companies a fee, every month, and you stream them the content! You don’t have to stream them ALL your content, but you could just stream your TV shows, and people would probably pay you eight bucks a month for that. We’re just saying, you might be leaving some money on the table here.

Time Warner Cable finally cuts a deal for HBO Go [Engadget]

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