HBO NOW, the New Standalone Streaming Service from HBO, Premiering in April Exclusively on AppleTV, iPad, and iPhone
HBO's CEO Richard Plepler on Monday at the Apple event in San Francisco announced the launch of the standalone HBO NOW app that will be coming to Apple products exclusively beginning April in time for the start of the fifth season of Game of Thrones which is set to premiere on Sunday, April 12, 2015.
Through the HBO NOW app which users can download onto their iPhones, iPads, Apple TV or iPod Touch units, they can for the first time get access to new HBO programming without a cable subscription. The service will be available for $14.99 a month. For three months, Apple gets an exclusive deal to sell the service; after that, other companies are expected to get involved selling access to the HBO Now app.
Back in October of last year, Plepler announced that starting in 2015, HBO will be offering their on-demand service as a separate subscription unattached to the cable TV channel in the United States. At present, viewers can access the HBO Go on-demand service, but only if they also subscribe to the channel through their cable provider. According to Plepler, there are 10 million households in the United States who are now broadband only, so they felt it was time to separate HBO Go and the HBO channel. Said he then: "We will go beyond the wall and launch a stand-alone over-the-top service with the potential to produce hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The international revenue possibilities could be just as large if not larger (with OTT). We have huge opportunity in front of us. We will use all means at our disposal to go after it."
HBO's long-standing relationship with pay-TV packages has prevented it from capturing key audiences, including younger people who may have never paid for TV service before and watch most of their entertainment online. Now that HBO NOW is already operational, viewers who pay the monthly fee will be able to get HBO content without having to pay for an entire cable package. Once they sign up, customers get full access to any HBO content, including new shows, archived old shows, movies, documentaries, and more. They can now get the same content that cable subscribers with HBO can see on the HBO Go streaming service.