Frack off, browncoat
-Captain Kirk

Rule of three, I guess.

The people who torrent shows/movies should find some way to donate money to the show's producers.

I understand people not wanting to subscribe to a thousand useless cable channels just to watch a single show, but by watching a show and not paying anything at all for it, it sends a message that shows like that aren't worth producing.

There are a shit load of garbage reality shows out there because they're cheap to make. A show like Game of Thrones is not cheap. Good shows like that will become more and more rare, and shit like Honey Boo Boo will become more common if everyone steals everything.

/just sayin'...

I buy each season in HD via iTunes ... Just wish they (HBO) wouldn't delay releasing it that way and instead release episodes like other shows

@4,

How soon do they offer that? Is it a relatively short period after the episode airs or many months like the DVDs?

@keshmeshi

It's about the same time frame as DVD's and Blu-rays

Yo ho ho the same night for me. Don't have any reason to wait to pay money.

Paul, there's a serious flaw in your logic. If HBO made a legal streaming version available, they'd have to price it high enough so that people wouldn't ditch their HBO subscriptions to stream it instead. If enough people ditched their subscriptions, they might not pick up enough revenue from new customers to make up the difference.

And that's not even taking into account all the billing and infrastructure they'd have to set up to make this work.

HBO isn't dumb. They know at some point they're going to be streaming. But until they can do it with out making less money, they aren't going to do it. When you look at it this way, the pirates aren't costing them any money.

arbeck @9 has it right. The number of torrenters is still much smaller than the number of people currently paying for an HBO subscription. And the number of pirates who'd be willing to pay enough to make it worth HBO's while is probably infinitesimally smaller.

HBO has talked about making their streaming service available to people who use preferred cable -affiliated internet providers as an approximate compromise that might not be too detrimental to their (or their cable company infrastructure/billing/advertising) bottom line.

I would pay to see it. As it stands now, I wait until Netflix has the DVD and watch it as part of my Netflix package. I wait a year, but HBO isn't making as much off me as they could. You figure they have some people doing calculations to find the price point to stream it at a price to maximize profit.

@gttim

However, if they priced HBO low enough for you to be willing to pay; they might lose 10 paying customers to streaming. If that lost isn't made up by how much you pay; then it impossible for them to make any more money off of you than they already do.

meh. I torrent it, and then when the Blu ray comes out I buy that. I think it all balances out.

Heros? Wasn't that shit on, like, channel 5?

The software company Adobe did something brilliant recently—with the majority of their income coming from enterprise customers, and knowing full well piracy was rampant among home users (that, plus education pricing helped maintain their market dominance), they started offering access to their products for a subscription fee that was far less than owning them outright. After 10 years of pirated versions, I bit, and I'm happy I did. Getting off track...

Maybe for HBO a similar approach (I get that they're already subscription based, but a staggered episode rental, or leasing certain programs after they air to Hulu, which I'm sure would cost Hulu a fortune, could work) compare to the kind of money they make from cable providers, but if I were them I'd definitely be experimenting to find the sweet spot.

I second thought, my analogy is wrong. If you pay for HBO for a single show, chances are you're going to be paying year-in and year-out. That's gold, and they probably aren't going to mess with it. Die-hard fans can buy the DVDs later.

Arguing with myself in a public forum... probably not OK.

Dude! If they just had the show for a dollar, HBO would have 1 MILLION DOLLARS!

(Each episode costs more than that.)

@9,10 - what about people who don't want to pay for cable, and who don't use "preferred cable-affiliated internet providers" (whatever that means)? That's my situation and I would certainly pay for an HBO subscription so that I could access online streaming shows. Why exactly is HBO so behold to the cable cabal?