Reports that look to be legitimate have been making the rounds in recent days. You can interpret them yourself if you so choose but the headline you’re probably most interested in is this: HBO is hoping to get their a la carte HBOGo subscription-without-cable plan out to the public in time for the launch of Game of Thrones season 5. While no air date has been announced, based on past season premiere dates we’re placing that window around the beginning of April 2015.
HBO Go is a mostly stable program, despite some reports to the contrary. On any given day the servers are humming like a river through the river-lands. But on big premiere and finale nights such as with True Detective last year, the service can become overwhelmed for an hour or so— right at the time where tens of millions of viewers are logging on at the same time. Not a great user experience, right? Well in these same reports it looks like HBO is attempting to solve that problem as well.
HBO is teaming up with MLB Advanced, a technology company that created Major League Baseball’s streaming app as well as “WatchESPN“, their app. There was apparently some drama around HBO’s Cheif Technology Officer, a man in charge of a team dedicated to making this HBO Go enhancement take shape but we’ll let you read more about that on your own if you’re interested in corporate politics. We’re not as intrigued.
The bottom line for us as HBO fans is that we’re getting a stand alone HBO Go app in 2015, looks like April at this point. The new service will also presumably be able to handle the throngs of Game of Thrones fans that will surely break records yet again in 2015.
Despite the above reports’ negative tones, we see this is great news for you, the viewer. HBO is taking care of business and making sure this happens when they said it would happen. Will you subscribe to HBO as a stand alone service?
