I worked at Kodak. I was at the status meeting where they explained they didn't want to tick off film retailers - at which point it was obvious the company was doomed.
HBO is not in danger of being put out of business by their equivalent of the digital camera, is what I'm saying. (Piracy is not the digital camera of content; digital contracts didn't break contracts, promises, or the law).
But: I said it snippily, and ineffectively. I apologize.
HBO's equivalent of the digital camera is on-release video streaming. There's a lot of us who just don't & won't have "cable TV", and who are willing to shell out money for access to shows the day they're released. Beholden to the distributor/retailer, HBO isn't doing independent streaming and is releasing discs long after initial release. The public's transition to streaming video is catching on and accelerating, entrenched technologies can be replaced a whole lot faster that most expect, and faced with evaporating audiences the existing distributors will hold HBO to exclusivity contracts. Oh sure it's not the same thing, but I'm seeing & expecting strong parallels. HBO is not too big to fail.
Snippy happens, given a soundbite-oriented medium. No prob. You want room 12A, just along the corridor.
HBO's equivalent of the digital camera is on-release video streaming.
This is nonsense and a horrible analogy. HBO is perfectly suited for the the future you envision. They have a digital streaming infrastructure in place to make the transition they just don't yet have the business case.
The reason the analogy fails is because HBO isn't a medium. Its the content - ask Netflix how easy it is to make a living streaming mediocre video content. Switching to a different distribution mechanism is trivial but for now they're not going to cut off their nose to spite their face just because a tiny subset of subscribers are moving away from cable.
>They have a digital streaming infrastructure in place to make the transition they just don't yet have the business case.
I think that's the biggest part that goes missing in these discussions. Yeah, it's annoying that the moment that they require you to go through a tv provider, but I can see why they wouldn't want to alienate a large revenue source right now.
That said, it's pretty significant that they're building up their streaming infrastructure in the first place. The day will come when cable providers aren't worth cozying up to anymore, and it might even be sooner than HBO thinks. However, if they have everything in place it's going to be a lot easier to push out an update allowing web only customers than it would be to build their streaming service from scratch.
It remains to be seen, of course, how they will make that transition. It's arguable, though, that they aren't nearly as unprepared as some people are making them out to be.
Kodak had a good digital camera plan in place. They just didn't take it seriously and didn't move fast enough when a tiny subset of photographers were moving away from film. They were beholden to distributors, not consumers, of their product.
