| "It seems to be more closely related to the fact that HBO has evolved symbiotically with cable over many decades" Yes, and that might even be an understatement. To the extent HBO moves into direct-subscription or advertising-driven models, it'll need to find a way to do those in addition to its existing, cable-licensing business -- not as an alternative. The problem is that HBO makes a lot more money licensing to cable providers than it realistically could by selling episodes a la carte, by selling advertising, or by selling HBO subscriptions individually. Any president or C-level exec at HBO (regardless of its corporate parent) is going to have a hell of a time initiating that process, politically, organizationally, or economically. It would basically amount to telling shareholders, stakeholders, and peers that one is going to jeopardize X to pursue a very uncertain X/4. HBO will go a la carte, or ad-driven, if and when it can figure out how to make the economics of doing so more attractive than the economics of B2B licensing fees. That's easier said than done. It will probably require one of two things: 1) a platform-agnostic licensing strategy, i.e., to diversify away from cable; or 2) a complete rethinking of content forms, types, and salability. It bears mentioning that even ad-driven broadcast networks make more money off of cable licensing than they do from advertising. (The revenue split is about 48% advertising and 52% cable/distribution fees, trending toward 40/60.) As for the article's fundamental mistake--conflating Time Warner with Time Warner Cable--that's a pretty big one. TWC spun out from TW back in 2009. |
Many people speak of Australia, but take Germany as another extreme example. HBO doesn't offer its services here so there are only two options if you want to watch Game of Thrones:
1: Get a subscription of Sky, which is mostly sports and has a minimum subscription time of 2 years. So if you're not into sports, that's about 800$ for two seasons of Game of Thrones.
2: Wait one year and then buy the DVD, because it will be available exactly one year later.
The thing about culture, though, is that you can't participate in the phenomenon that is happening _now_ if you have to wait a year.
So everybody here is pirating it like crazy. Curiously enough, Germany never appears in the piracy statistics because due to some weird legal specialties here, your chance of getting caught when using Bittorrent are 100%.
All the non-tech people I talk to watch it using sketchy streaming sites, thus generating advertising revenue for criminals and infecting their Windows boxen with malware.
I don't know what the long-run consequences are, but they can't be good.