Age of the Geek

By: 
Travis Fischer

Streaming Into The Future

 

     Score another one for the cord cutters.

     Two, actually.

     Last week during a Time Warner Inc. investor meeting, Richard Plepler, the chairman and CEO of HBO, announced that HBO will be offering a stand-alone streaming service in 2015. Noting that there are currently ten million broadband only homes, and that number projected to keep growing, Pepler said, "That is a large and growing opportunity that should no longer be left untapped. It's time to remove all barriers to those who want HBO."

     Or, as I read it in my head, "Look, 'Game of Thrones' is the most pirated show on the Internet. Clearly this audience isn't going to come to us, so we need to go to them."

     HBO's streaming service will force their less-than-legal viewers to put their money where their mouth is. While no doubt a certain segment of illegal downloaders will decide that any price is too high for HBO content, I suspect they'll be surprised at the number of people willing to shell out the monthly subscription fee for unlimited streaming content.

     This move will put HBO in direct competition with other streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Oddly enough, HBO themselves made an agreement with Amazon Instant Video earlier this year to run older HBO shows.

     Not to be outdone, the day after the HBO announcement, CBS launched "CBS All-Access," their own streaming service which provides access to both new shows and a healthy amount of their back catalogue.

     But while streaming is certainly the wave of the future, it could be a rough wave to ride. CBS's service runs $6 a month. It's guessed that HBO's will be twice that. If every network decides they want to have their own subscription based service, the cost of keeping up may end up being more than current cable packages.

     And while competition among the networks should keep prices reasonable, there's another issue to take into consideration. Namely, it's a pain to try to keep track of so many different services.

     Right now I use Hulu to keep up with "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," along with whatever is on Fox, NBC, ABC, and The CW. I'm not looking forward to the day that all these different networks decide to take their shows and put them behind their own subscription based streaming service.

     As noted above, before deciding to start their own streaming service HBO made a deal with Amazon to stream some of their older shows. I can't imagine this kind of deal lasting in the long term. HBO needs to give people a reason to buy their service and that can't happen if they are providing their competition with their own material.

     It's easy to see content from other services getting scaled back as the content creators decide to do it on their own.

     Perhaps eventually somebody will make some sort of arrangement with all these streaming services, bundle them all together, and sell them as a complete package. Now that sounds like a revolutionary idea.

 

     Travis Fischer is a news reporter for Mid-America Publishing and needs some time to catch up on his queue.

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