So I cut the cord back in May, and tonight was the first real stress test: the Season 7 premiere of Game of Thrones. "Dragonstone" at 9pm, no cable box, no DVR, just me, the couch, and whatever HBO Now decided to do to me.
Quick backstory for anyone new here — I ditched Comcast in the spring after my bill crept up to $187 a month for a package I mostly used to watch four shows. I kept HBO Now going through the AT&T unlimited plan bundle, the one where HBO's basically thrown in for free if you're on their higher tier. Which, fun fact, is its own weird footnote to the whole net neutrality fight everyone's been arguing about since Wednesday's Day of Action. Zero-rating HBO traffic while sites like Netflix and Reddit were plastering the internet with "the internet is at risk" banners is a pretty funny bit of cognitive dissonance and I don't think enough people are talking about it. I saw at least six of those banners on Wednesday and by banner number four I'd stopped reading them entirely, which is probably not what Fight for the Future was going for.
Anyway. Back to Thrones.
The app itself held up better than I expected, though "better than I expected" is a low bar because HBO Now crashed hard during the Season 6 finale last year and I still have not fully forgiven it. Tonight there was one hiccup around the twenty-minute mark, a good ten seconds of spinning wheel right as things were getting good, and then it recovered and ran clean the rest of the hour. My roommate watched on his phone in the kitchen because our TV situation is currently just a laptop propped on a cereal box (long story, the actual TV mount fell out of the wall in June and I have not dealt with it), and his stream never hiccuped at all, so maybe it's a load thing on their end and not universal.
Small complaint that has nothing to do with servers: the app still won't let you skip the "previously on" recap without also skipping ten seconds into the actual cold open. I've mentioned this before I think, but it bugs me every single time. Every other streaming app I use has this figured out. Not HBO Now, apparently, not yet.
The bigger thing I keep chewing on is how different watching a "live" show is now compared to five years ago when I started this blog. There's no appointment anxiety anymore, not really, except socially — my group chat was already spoiling reactions before I'd even hit play because two people watched it an hour earlier on the west coast feed. I used to think streaming would kill the shared-moment aspect of TV and instead it just shifted the moment from "everyone watching at 9pm sharp" to "everyone watching within a three hour window and yelling about it in a group chat regardless." Which honestly might be better. The group chat during the Dragonstone cold open was better content than most of my Twitter feed this year.
Unrelated tangent because it's been sitting in my browser tabs all week: I did buy something on Prime Day last Tuesday, an Anker charging cable for $6 that I definitely could've found for the same price without a made-up shopping holiday attached to it. I keep seeing people online act like Prime Day was some kind of retail earthquake and mostly what I remember is refreshing the deals page four times and buying one cable. Your mileage may vary. Mine was underwhelming.
One thing I will say for cutting cable: I have genuinely not missed live news or cable in general nearly as much as I expected to when I made the call in May. The only real gap is football season, which is still months out, and I already know I'm going to end up doing some kind of ugly workaround with a Sling subscription come September. I'm not proud of it. I just know myself.
For now though, HBO Now did its job, the cereal box TV stand held together for another night, and Dragonstone was a good hour of television even with the buffering wheel taking a victim in the middle of it. More thoughts once the season gets further along, assuming the app doesn't fall over again first.