Will HBO Soon Be Selling Shows Directly To Consumers?

Courtesy of appleinsider.com

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, while attending a recent investment conference, was approached about the idea of selling HBO shows directly to its consumers.

Currently HBO offers HBO Go, a streaming service that allows audiences to watch the network’s most popular series with a paid TV subscription.

So would HBO consider direct selling to “anybody who’s got a broadband connection”, thereby avoiding cable distributors altogether?

Bewkes had a lengthy answer for the question, basically coming down to one fact: HBO is definitely considering this new move.

We are always looking at it.

What we’ve basically been doing, we’re looking at the market. We’ve been looking at our ability to service customers and our distributors. And basically up until now, it looked to us as though the best and main opportunity was to focus on improving the penetration, the offering, the servicing, the interface, the monetization of HBO through the existing affiliate system. And part of the reason for that was, first of all, there were some real places of opportunity and underperformers there.

Secondly, the broadband-only opportunity up until now wasn’t again looked to us to be really at the point where it would be smart to move the focus from one to the other.

So now the broadband opportunity is getting quite a bit bigger, and the ability of the plant to deliver something robust is getting stronger; and so the question you’re asking is becoming more viable, more interesting.

What we’re trying to do is basically make sure that we’ve done everything we can with our distributors to take advantage and have them take advantage of what customers they could have. And we’ve got to keep looking actively.

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We’re seriously considering what is the best way to deal with online distribution, but I don’t have anything to announce about it today.

So HBO lovers, how do you feel about this? Do you prefer HBO Go’s subscription system or the new methods? Let us know!

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