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Many of us are still holding our breath for a way to watch HBO’s original programming without a cable subscription, but it seems as if we’re all about to turn collectively blue in the face.
Speaking at the GeekWire Summit in Seattle today, HBO’s CTO Otto Berkes said that HBO has “an extremely powerful and effective business model. It would not make sense to disrupt that unless the upside were significantly higher than any potential downside.” So that, it would appear, is that, to the dismay of the many who want to consume HBO programming but don't want to fork over money for other channels they don't really want.
Berkes noted, though, that HBOGo was quite successful and that 60% of HBOGo users were using mobile devices to view content. He didn’t comment on the percentage that use devices like the Apple TV, nor could he confirm that HBOGo would be coming to the Xbox One. He did say, though, that HBO was interested in being on all the most “popular platforms going forward”, which both the Xbox One and PS4 would likely qualify as, one would wager.
He also mentioned that the recently opened engineering office here in Seattle is “a real cornerstone for our future plans. We are hiring hardcore software developers who could potentially do anything.” Indeed, a quick search finds a couple of intriguing open positions for those devs.
The GeekWire Summit goes throughout the day and you can watch it here.
