So I did the thing I said I'd never do. I watched the Game of Thrones premiere last night without cable, through an app, on my TV, and it mostly just worked, which honestly still feels weird to type out.
Backstory for anyone who doesn't follow this stuff as closely as I apparently do: HBO launched HBO Now back on April 7th, a standalone streaming subscription that doesn't require a cable package at all. Fourteen ninety-nine a month. For the first three months it's exclusive to Apple, so you're signing up through the App Store, watching on an iPhone, iPad, or the new $69 Apple TV, or through hbonow.com on a browser. No Roku, no Chromecast, no Fire TV. If you're an Android person or you use literally any other streaming box, you're out of luck until the fall when the exclusivity window ends.
I've had cable my entire adult life mostly because of two shows, Thrones being one of them, and I've been telling myself for two years that I'd cut it the second there was a clean way to keep just HBO. So Sunday night, "The Wars to Come" airs at 9pm, and I fire up the app on my Apple TV instead of turning on the cable box for probably the first time in about six years.
The signup process itself was more annoying than the actual watching. You sign up through iTunes, which means it's buried in your Apple ID subscription settings instead of anywhere sensible, and if you ever want to cancel you have to go dig through Settings on your phone rather than just, I dont know, a website. That's such a small thing but it's the kind of small thing that makes we wonder if anyone at Apple actually uses their own subscription management screen before shipping it.
The stream itself held up fine. No buffering during the episode, picture looked sharp on a 55 inch TV from a normal living room couch distance, and the app itself is clean, way less cluttered than the regular HBO Go app I'd used at a friend's place before. There's something almost funny about how much better a brand new $14.99 app looks compared to the ancient cable box UI I've been staring at for a decade. My cable box still has the DVR interface that looks like it was designed in 2007, because it probably was.
The premiere itself, no spoilers here since not everyone's caught up, but it did the thing season openers of this show always do: table-setting, a lot of characters spread across a lot of continents, and one scene that made my stomach drop a little. Typical Thrones stuff. I will say the new opening credits map addition (Dorne, Braavos) was a nice touch if you're the kind of person who actually watches the intro every week, which I am, unlike basically everyone else I know who skips straight to the episode.
Here's my actual complaint though, and its a real one: this show is still, by a wide margin, the most pirated thing on the internet, and I don't think a $15/month app exclusive to one hardware ecosystem for its first three months is going to change that in any real way. If you're on Android, or you don't own an Apple device, or you just don't want to deal with iTunes billing, torrenting the episode is still going to be faster and easier than what I just did, and that's kind of a bad look for an industry that's spent years complaining about piracy numbers. I get why the Apple exclusivity deal happened, Apple clearly paid for it and wanted a splashy launch tied to their event a few weeks back, but it feels like a decision made by two companies' business development teams and not by anyone thinking about the actual viewer at 9pm on a Sunday.
Anyway. I'm keeping cable for now because my partner has shows I'd have to give up, but I'm going to keep the HBO Now trial running in parallel for the rest of the season just to see if I miss anything by not having the cable box on. First data point: I didn't miss it at all last night. We'll see how that holds up by episode four or five when I inevitably want to rewatch something and go looking for it in the wrong app.