So HBO Now finally showed up this week, it went live last Tuesday, April 7th, and I've spent the last few nights poking at it instead of doing basically anything productive. $14.99 a month, no cable subscription required, sign up straight through iTunes. That's the pitch, and for once the pitch is basically true.
I don't own an Apple TV. I know, I know, for a guy who writes about tech constantly I have a weirdly outdated living room setup, I've got a Roku 3 hooked up to the TV and it's served me fine for years. Except HBO Now isn't on Roku. Not yet, anyway. It's iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV only right now, because HBO cut an exclusivity deal with Apple that runs through the summer. So I'm watching Silicon Valley reruns on a 4.7 inch screen propped against a cereal box on my kitchen counter like some kind of animal. It works, technically. It's not what I'd call comfortable.
The actual app is fine. Not amazing, not broken, just fine. Scrolling through the library feels a little sluggish on my phone, and it wants a genuinely fast connection if you don't want the picture to go soft during anything with a lot of motion. I tried it over the office wifi at a coffee shop on Tuesday afternoon just to see and it buffered twice in the first ten minutes, so don't count on that as your backup plan if your home internet goes down.
What actually matters here isn't the interface, its the fact that this is the first time HBO has let you get the whole channel without also paying Comcast or Time Warner $80 a month for a bundle you don't want. That's the real story. Cord-cutting people have been asking for this since Netflix started actually being good, and HBO held out longer than almost anyone. Now it's here, and it stacks right on top of whatever else you're already paying for streaming: Netflix, maybe Hulu if you're one of the three people who still bothers with Hulu, and suddenly your "I don't pay for cable" savings account is looking a lot less impressive. I did the math and between Netflix and this I'm at almost $24 a month just for two services, which is creeping uncomfortably close to what basic cable used to cost me back when I still had it in 2011.
Worth it though? Probably, yeah. I went back and started rewatching The Wire from episode one because it had been long enough that I'd forgotten who half the characters even were, and having the whole back catalog just sitting there without needing a cable login is genuinely nice. No more borrowing someone's parents HBO Go password and hoping it still works.
The timing isn't an accident either. Game of Thrones season five premieres this Sunday, the 12th, and HBO clearly wanted the service live and stress-tested before millions of people try to log in at 9pm that night wanting to watch Jon Snow do whatever Jon Snow is going to do this season. Smart move on their part. Launch a few days early, let the early adopters like me find the rough edges, iron out what you can before the real traffic spike hits.
If you're still on the fence and you've got an iPhone lying around, there's a free trial period when you sign up, so there's not much reason not to just try it for a weekend. Just don't expect it on your Roku or your Xbox or your Android phone anytime soon — that exclusivity window with Apple isn't ending early for anybody, no matter how much you complain about it on Twitter. Believe me, I checked.