HBO Now Is Giving People What They Want, And Cable Companies Aren’t Happy

HBO Now, the new streaming service HBO announced on Monday, is primed to give consumers the exact thing they’ve been asking for for years: the option to pick and choose what they watch, instead of buying everything in bulk.

The service, coming next month ahead of the premiere of Game of Thrones Season 5, will be temporarily exclusive to the Apple TV for a three month period. After that time, however, other companies are expected to support the standalone HBO service and offer their customers convenient access, but this will most likely be where the most push back will take place.

As reported by Variety, cable providers are unwilling to see HBO Now as anything more than a big threat to the way they run their businesses. It’s an understandable viewpoint, since HBO is one of the most popular (and desirable) premium channels out there, and prior to the announcement of HBO Now, people needed to subscribe to cable companies and pay for HBO in order to enjoy it.

The approaching launch of the new app will largely do away with that requirement, and in a survey conducted by Parks Associates last month, it was revealed that almost half of the people questioned would cancel their TV subscriptions in the event that HBO released a streaming service that didn’t require cable.

Time Warner owns HBO, and its CEO, Jeff Bewkes, during the Deutsche Bank Media, Internet & Telecom Conference today, acknowledged the fact that some companies don’t like HBO Now, but also believes those companies will come to support it, eventually.

“Most of our distributors are on board with us, and they’re going to push it. We have some that think that it’s competitive with them and they wish that they could maintain the sole place to get an HBO.

It’s in their interest to take this powerful product and sell it in every way that their consumers want to get it. They simply have to be more vigorous about it.”

Cable companies have a decent amount of time to decide whether or not to back HBO Now, though it’d be difficult to imagine a situation in which those companies fight against the service and aren’t met with backlash from their customers. The timing of the service’s launch just before one of the channel’s biggest shows comes back is clearly a deliberate move; most likely one that will really get people talking about the idea of leaving cable subscriptions behind.

And, according to ThinkProgress, HBO’s team-up with Apple could be taken as a sign that it’s unconcerned with where cable companies end up after all this. Being the most wanted/watched premium channel is all that matters.

[Image via Apple]