The Glade 4.0

Hoooooooray! The online streaming game becomes further fragmented! **** them all, I am switching to pirating.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

HBO, the big curmudgeon who hates people who don't have cable or satellite subscriptions, has agreed to allow Amazon to their shows. Most of them anyway.

I expect it's only a matter of time before I can see Game of Thrones on that list too.

HBO has created what amounts to free-to-play television.

"Basically, we've been dealing with this issue for years with HBO, literally 20, 30 years, where people have always been running wires down on the back of apartment buildings and sharing with their neighbors," Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said on a conference call. "Our experience is, it all leads to more penetration, more paying subs, more health for HBO, less reliance on having to do paid advertising — we don't do a whole lot of paid advertising on HBO, we let the programming and the views talk for us — it seems to be working."

This is why HBO can shrug off piracy; they would much rather you pirate an individual show and talk about it online or with friends to spread their brand rather than offer a breakout product that would allow people the option to drop their subscription.

You can have a company that offers HBO by itself, or you can have a company that is fine with piracy as long as the show's cultural relevance remains high. You can't have both. The money is simply too good in the current model for anything to change, and the high levels of piracy don't equal lost subscriptions in a way that matters to Time Warner's bottom line.

HBO, the big curmudgeon who hates people who don't have cable or satellite subscriptions, has agreed to allow Amazon to their shows.