HBO to Launch Stand Alone Streaming Service in April to Coincide With New Game of Thrones Season 5

[dgstorm]

This news is slightly off topic, but we know how many of you are fans of HBO Go so we wanted to share this news.

Oh happy day! That's what many of us will be singing at some point in April 2015 if HBO can stick to their recently announced schedule. That's when HBO plans to launch their stand-alone streaming service. Their intention is for the launch of the service to coincide with the 5th season of their monster smash hit series, Game of Thrones.

They announced their plan to dump the in-house streaming platform project called "Maui" that they are working on. They will instead license MLB Advanced's streaming technology. As a sidenote, HBO Go in its current form might be axed in favor of this new service. There are even reports of executive squabbling regarding these major shifts in HBO's business model. You can read HBO's statement in the thread, and more on the internal drama at the source link below.

Source: Fortune

 

[dgstorm]

Here's a fitting animated gif and the HBO schedule statement below,

"HBO executive management has made a decision to pursue an external solution for the product that was being built by the Maui team. This decision was not made lightly, and was based on an assessment of risk and scope of the product needed to meet HBO¹s short term business needs for April 2015. This was not a judgment of the team¹s work quality or deliverables but rather a bet that an existing streaming service could deliver the needed product faster and at lower risk than Maui.

This means that effective today the Maui project is cancelled.
Canceling a project is unpleasant, especially when the target is in sight and tantalizingly close. Drew and I have often discussed the excellent work done by the team on Maui – The Maui team was hitting deliverables ahead of schedule and at a high level of quality. Maui's timeframe caused us to make concessions both in scope and culture. We look forward to returning to teams defining scope, and consumer experiences without forced top down scheduling.
The larger technology team now has three core missions.
1. Our top priority: Fully support the work needed to enable the external solution for April. To begin this work we have asked a small forward group to engage and assess with the external partner and get to a detailed statement of work as quickly as possible. Once that SoW is complete we will staff to meet our deliverables.
2. A large portion of Maui's effort can be repurposed for HBO GO, a top priority for HBO. We will continue to make HBO GO the best global capable streaming service available. This means that we redouble and focus our efforts, first for the April timeframe with our scale and robustness goals for Game of Thrones, and second with our longer term plan to deploy Hurley, and a suite of Hadron clients as quickly as possible. We will also fold as much as possible of the good work done for Maui into HBO GO where we can.
3. We will continue our efforts around interactive and other future looking areas on a case by case basis the same way we do today.
Maui was a way to get us into market faster with a less than perfect solution – the external partner will take that burden allowing us to focus on the forward looking technologies we are creating for HBO GO.
Mark and Drew"

 

[Ollie]

So it sounds like Go is their platform of choice for the future. I wonder who the external partner is that they keep referencing?

 

[pc747]

We just need to find a way to do that with sports (ie NFL and NCAA). As of right now you still have to have a cable subscription (or know someone with a cable subscription) with the sport package in order to stream WatchESPN. The writing is on the wall which is why it cost more to have internet by itself vs having it bundled with cable. We just need Google Fiber to kick into high gear and get set up across the country. But I am sure they are meeting some challenges with local governments getting kickbacks from cable companies to continue the status quo.

 

[kodiak799]

I'll reserve my enthusiasm until I see pricing.