Variety reports that premium cable subscirptions are beginning to drop as Netflix subscriptions continue to grow. Hmmm, I wonder why??? Could it be that people don't want to overpay to get one channel they want and a ton they'll never watch?
And yet with all this going on, the CEO of HBO recently said that he doesn't care if people use their friends' HBO Go accounts to basically get the service for free. Via the Verge:
"It presents the brand to more and more people and gives them an opportunity, hopefully, to become addicted to it," HBO CEO Richard Plepler tells BuzzFeed. Plepler says that HBO is well aware that people share their account passwords, but he views it as a "terrific marketing vehicle" rather than an obstacle. "What we're in the business of is building addicts, building video addicts," he says, "and the way we do that is exposing our product and our shows and our brand to more and more people."
To me this sounds like the reaction by Blackberry when the iPhone came out. Arrogant and naive. Netflix will continue to grow while HBO slides until the idiots at HBO realize they need to make a change, and by then it might be too late; see again: Blackberry. You can only make hit shows that have huge budgets if people are paying to watch it and currently the only way to watch it is to pay out the ass for cable or use a friends' account, like I and many other people are doing right now. I wonder how many people will do it now that HBO has declared they don't care about it, and how quickly HBO will backtrack once it it gets worse.
So the next time a friends family member says they have HBO, ask if they wouldn't mind sharing their account. Multiple people can use one account with no issue and as you've read, HBO certainly doesn't mind.
