Dear HBO GO,
Your
service is shit, let’s face it.
Nothing loads well the first time, and the second requires a
hard reboot.
The servers crash when a new episode of True Detective comes
on.
Game of Thrones loses sound at absolutely crucial moments
for no discernible reason.
And I can only get your service through a smart TV or a
gaming console!
Look,
HBO. You already have a monopoly on the
only watchable television out there; your only major competitor is Netflix, and
they’ll run out of funding on their $8/month far before you ever will. So why on earth would you not fix these
issues so using GO is actually pleasurable??
You and I
both know I paid a lot, I repeat a LOT, of money for my Roku 3. And yet you refuse to let GO stream on it??
I’m your target audience: nerds who spend a lot of time in front of the TV or
on the Internet. You know I’m going to
be buying what you’re selling, so why make it painful for all of us?
Don’t get
me wrong: I’m super grateful I no longer have to get cable in order to watch
HBO stuff. I gave up cable years ago
when Netflix got huge and have never looked back, except to wonder about all
the cool stuff I was missing on HBO.
Waiting 8 months to get the next Game of Thrones season from the
library, or paying far too much to buy the box set of Sex and the City was bad
enough – I was on board with HBO streaming from the start.
Until I
found out I needed a Smart TV for it to be any good at all.
My husband
owns just about every gaming console known to nerds, so I can get GO, no
worries. But it’s shit! (As I may have
mentioned.) On top of those issues, the hi-def quality is just not there, and
the buffering time required for that means that by the time I can get an
episode to actually load in 1080p, the spoilers and/or questions about what the
fuck, exactly, is happening on this episode of True Detective are already
blowing up my phone.
I’m not going to run out and buy a
Smart TV -- and it has to be an LG one?? Fuck that! -- for a thousand dollars
just to watch The Brink – for that kind of money, I’ll suck it up and torrent
it, shit quality and all. So why, when
you are losing potential customers, make GO exclusive to certain devices??
And really:
shows that don’t buffer when paused?? Even YouTube does that now; hell, even
SchoolTube (the ‘kid friendly’ version of YouTube where you won’t accidentally
see a tit or hear someone yelling “die, motherfucker!” in the background) does
that now!
Even worse:
What am I supposed to do when said non-buffering app crashes in the middle of
someone important’s death? I worship Game of Thrones; each lost second means someone else could die! And
I have to scroll all the way through the entire 47 minutes until that point,
wait for all that to back-buffer, and then once the video finally shows up
again… the sound goes AWOL.
Maybe it’s
a good thing I didn’t buy that Smart TV because there are times I want to throw
whatever GO streaming device I’m using out the window.
I’d drop
your service, but hey, I’m watching it on my in-laws’ subscription anyway, so I
guess really I can’t complain. Or at
least, not too loudly. Really, since I’m
not paying for it… why should you care?
Sincerely,
