A list of complaints include HD content is (was?) only available on Samsung Smart TVs, meaning you were only given SD quality when streaming through your computer or any other device. Same goes for surround sound and 5.1, which are only available through the Samsung TV app. Other complaints I've heard includes buffering problems with the Widevine plugin (at standard definition), and lack of Apple Airplay support. The product is available as iOS and Android apps, but Xbox and Playstation apps are still said to be under development.

The online UI is nice to look at but was poorly designed; initially HBO only allowed you to search for TV shows by alphabetical letter. The results were underwhelming and exaggerated how little content HBO was offering.

...

It should be noted that you're not given access to the full back catalogue, several classics are not available such as Deadwood and Oz, which apparently have some copyright restrictions.

Some might claim it's still a good deal at €9.95/month, considering most people can't access any of these shows legally without a full cable package. Of course, Netflix only costs €7.99/month in the region, and has a larger selection, which makes the price a little less impressive. Then there's the fact that HBO initially promised much, much more:

• Every episode of all HBO series available online
• All new episodes available within 24 hours of the US premiere, with local subtitles (dubbing is rare in the Nordics, foreign TV shows and movies are usually subtitled in the local language)
• Works on practically all devices: smartphones, tablets (Android, iOS), computers (Windows, Linux, Mac), video game consoles (PS3, Xbox), Samsung Smart TVs and Blu-ray players, and Sonera IPTV service
• Full HD 1080p picture quality
• Surround sound

Compare that to the list of complaints, and you realize HBO isn't doing a great job of living up to the expectations it created. Then there's the other truly insane catch: customers are locked into a 12-month contract, after which they must give 3-month notice for cancellation. Yeah. Moreover, the terms stated that simply logging into the service once waives your ability to cancel it because you're not satisfied (despite using the service being the only way to know if you are satisfied). After facing significant criticism for this move, HBO backtracked and offered subscribers the chance to use the service until the end of this month without a longer commitment—but only those subscribers who also signed up for the HBO Nordic newsletter. Classy.

It's no real surprise that HBO's first attempt at a standalone online offering is a disaster. HBO approaches the internet with extreme trepidation, but revolution requires gusto. Digital distribution—especially when it comes to competing with piracy—is a go big or go home endeavor. Or... go halfway, and watch your customers go elsewhere.

Despite this creative attempt to escape from the express holding of Cablevision, for the reasons discussed below this Court finds itself constrained to reject the approach Plaintiffs urge. Contrary to Plaintiffs' arguments, the copies Aereo's system creates are not materially distinguishable from those in Cablevision, which found that the transmission was made from those copies rather than from the incoming signal. Moreover, Plaintiffs' attempt to distinguish Cablevision based on time-shifting fails when confronted with the reasoning of that case, particularly considering that the Second Circuit's analysis was directly focused on the significance of Cablevision' s copies but did not say one word to suggest that time-shifting played any part in its holding.

"I think is very likely to induce quite different behavior than one would expect to see in the 'Big Brother' show."

CBS ANNOUNCES DEVELOPMENT OF “DANCING ON THE STARS,” AN EXCITING AND COMPLETELY ORIGINAL REALITY PROGRAM THAT OWES ITS CONCEPT AND EXECUTION TO NOBODY AT ALL

Los Angeles, June 20, 2012 – Subsequent to recent developments in the creative and legal community, CBS Television today felt it was appropriate to reveal the upcoming launch of an exciting, groundbreaking and completely original new reality program for the CBS Television Network.

The dazzling new show, DANCING ON THE STARS, will be broadcast live from the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and will feature moderately famous and sort of well-known people you almost recognize competing for big prizes by dancing on the graves of some of Hollywood’s most iconic and well-beloved stars of stage and screen.

The cemetery, the first in Hollywood, was founded in 1899 and now houses the remains of Andrew “Fatty” Arbuckle, producer Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Paul Muni, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, George Harrison of the Beatles and Dee Dee Ramone of the Ramones, among many other great stars of stage, screen and the music business. The company noted that permission to broadcast from the location is pending, and that if efforts in that regard are unsuccessful, approaches will be made to Westwood Village Memorial Park, where equally scintillating luminaries are interred.

“This very creative enterprise will bring a new sense of energy and fun that’s totally unlike anything anywhere else, honest,” said a CBS spokesperson, who also revealed that the Company has been working with a secret team for several months on the creation of the series, which was completely developed by the people at CBS independent of any other programming on the air. “Given the current creative and legal environment in the reality programming business, we’re sure nobody will have any problem with this title or our upcoming half-hour comedy for primetime, POSTMODERN FAMILY.”

“After all,” the spokesperson added, “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

Q: It’s been more than five years since the show signed off, so how is the fan base growing?

A: Two things: No. 1 YouTube. I mean fans are putting clips up there, and we are getting response, and we are getting new viewers that have never seen the show, only the clips on YouTube. And then we started putting them up ourselves. We are putting all the episodes up. We have about 120 episodes on YouTube now. Soon we will have all 300 up.

The second one is Facebook. We are almost at 500,000 followers on Facebook, so we have this line of communication. So between those two, I’d say brand awareness is more than ever."

Q: Will you ever bring the character back to television?

A: I really doubt it. For one thing, I’m really preferring the Internet to television these days. I like having direct contact with the fans rather than having to go through some middle man or interpreter. If I was to do anything, I would probably do it on the Internet rather than on TV.

Q: Have you considered a YouTube series or something similar?

A: Yeah. We’ve got some people that we’re talking to now that might want to do something like that, and that would interest me as opposed to the whole mess of a television series where you have to worry about the network folks. We don’t necessarily have overlapping agendas, and the older I get the harder it gets."

The judge also got into the act somewhat, addressing broadcasters' insistence that any customer who cancels his or her cable service to sign up with Aereo is a problem. How does subtracting one subscriber impact advertising, asked the judge, which caused the CBS executive to admit that it would have to be one Nielsen household that canceled for impact, and later that it would more likely have to be a substantial number of defections.

Users of the Hopper's PrimeTime AnyTime feature who record Plaintiff's prime-time shows and use the Hopper's Auto Hop feature to automatically skip commercials otherwise contained in those recordings infringe Plaintiffs' exclusive reproduction rights under section 106 of the Copyright Act,

Auto Hop is a more efficient way of achieving what consumers already do with standard DVRs. A 30-second skip feature is already standard on many DVR remote controls. It permits viewers to automatically skip ahead in a recording, at the touch of a button, completely bypassing a typical 30-second television commercial. The remote controls that come with DVRs supplied by Comcast, an NBC affiliate, can be programmed to include this 30-second skip feature. DISH has provided a 30-second skip feature for years. By pressing the 30-second skip button multiple times, a viewer can elect to bypass the full complement of commercials between show segments. Now, DISH allows the customer to opt to use an Auto Hop feature that is just an extension of this 30-second skip function. It avoids the common frustration that occurs when viewers, using the 30-second skip or plain fast-forwarding, overshoot the commercials and fastforward into the television programming content that they really want to watch.

DISH's Auto Hop feature promotes consumer autonomy. Viewers have skipped commercials for decades. Viewers commonly use the commercial break as a time to get up and momentarily leave the room. Ever since the advent of the remote control, viewers have changed channels or muted the sound during commercial breaks. And, since the advent of the VCR and DVR, viewers playing back a show have fast-forwarded through commercials. DISH is simply making it easier for viewers to refuse to be a captive audience and to exercise the well-accepted choice to skip a commercial.

Sometimes I just want to fire up an episode and watch it on my laptop immediately and with mobility as I'm wandering around the house, and not worry about streaming/quality issues or finding a disk, setting up the DVD player etc. I am truly lazy.

Meanwhile, Game of Thrones continues to have great ratings. And the torrent piracy count doesn't include streams, which are also hugely popular, so it only represents a fraction of the pirate world. Why not create new ways to legitimize some of those viewers, especially considering so many of them have said they want to be legitimized? I still contend that HBO-style shows owe a lot to piracy for their cultural dominance, because, if they were actually as exclusive as HBO wants to pretend they are, they would have had a much harder time gathering fans. But HBO co-president Eric Kessler thinks cord-cutting is a fad, so like most characters in the show, he's fighting silly battles while ignoring what's really going on.

All documents concerning Aereo or the Aereo service, including without limitation (i) communications with or about Aereo, the Aereo service or Aereo’s business plans, (ii) presentations or other documents received from Aereo, and (iii) documents or communications concerning the potential impact of Aereo or the Aereo service on broadcast television networks and stations, or the producers of broadcast television.

It's a good theory, but only some are prepared to mention the elephant in the room: plenty of people (quite possibly the majority) caught up through unauthorized streams and torrents, just like Matthew Inman. And that brings us to the bigger elephant lurking in the whole house: how much has piracy contributed to the rise of HBO-style television? Would we have complex, high-concept, critically acclaimed shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones without it? Many people attribute this fundamental shift in the nature of popular television, from episodic towards serialized, to DVDs and legitimate digital sources—but I'd wager that piracy is a much more significant factor.

There are two main reasons. Firstly, the ability to watch any episode any time makes such can't-miss-an-episode shows less of a commitment. This, alone, is the single biggest contributing factor to the popularity of heavily serialized television, and it is impossible to explain it entirely with DVDs and sources like iTunes. Many cable subscribers turn to piracy as a way to catch missed episodes, and that safety net prevents serialized shows from alienating viewers and losing momentum. Secondly, unauthorized sources are especially popular with the fanatics—the people who evangelize "must watch" shows to their friends and coworkers, and who create memes with screencaps to spread on Tumblr and Facebook. That's not to mention the amateur critics and TV bloggers who generate buzz (in fact, there is a bit of a back and forth going on over the ethics of piracy in the critic community).

Of course, as digital offerings get better, more and more of this kind of activity happens through legitimate channels instead of piracy (not like anyone's been saying that all along, or anything). But services like Netflix got to the table once the serial television trend was in full-swing, so they don't account for its inception. Some people fear that television piracy will put at end to such ambitious undertakings in the medium—but they should stop to consider the hand it played in making them possible to begin with.

The complaint does not allege that Programmers’ practice of selling “must-have” and low-demand channels in packages excludes other sellers of low-demand channels from the market, or that this practice raises barriers to entry into the programming market. Nor do the plaintiffs allege that the tying arrangement here causes consumers to forego the purchase of substitutes for the tied product.... Nothing in the complaint indicates that the arrangement between the Programmers and Distributors forces Distributors or consumers to forego the purchase of alternative low-demand channels.

It's addressed to "Dear Greens, dear Pirates, dear Left-wingers, dear Net community" -- as if these share a common position on copyright reform, which indicates just how little the authors of the letter understand their respective policies. The letter itself is framed in terms of what the scriptwriters term "life lies".

The main "life lie" concerns the idea that the term of copyright needs to be shortened to make it fit for the digital age, where huge numbers of people are creators as well as consumers:

Not only does the author suffer expropriation through a reduction in the copyright term and is thus dramatically worse off, no, this proposal doesn't even change the situation of the supposedly innocent end-user one bit: your illegal downloads or streams concern mostly the absolutely latest films, music, books, photos and designs -- and not works that are, say, 20, 40 or 60 years old. A shortening of the copyright term would change nothing for this problem, and would be purely symbolic: look, we have taken something away from the authors....

But more remarkable is the sense of entitlement -- the idea that authors have a right to a copyright term that for practical purposes is typically in excess of one hundred years (life plus 70 years in most jurisdictions.) They call any reduction of copyright "expropriation", and seem blissfully unaware that this necessarily implies that the repeated extension of copyright from the original 14 years of the 1710 Statute of Anne was a similar "expropriation" of the public domain.

The point here is that there is no reason why the term of copyright should only increase, or why it should not be reduced back to its original levels, or even beyond -- it's for society to decide how long the state-backed monopoly ought to be, and how much incentive is needed to encourage creativity. The scriptwriters' view, as laid bare in this open letter, reveals an indifference to the public's thoughts that borders on contempt.

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The TorrentFreak blog post is a little over the top. The story indicates that we 'took this drastic step in the hope of getting more people to watch shows live and thus make more revenue.' Nothing could be further from the truth.

Authenticating viewers is not about making sure they only watch live...in fact, quite the opposite—we support a 'TV Everywhere' proposition and are working with our distribution partners to benefit our businesses. It's about receiving fair value so we can continue to produce this expensive and high quality programming. We are pursuing a strategy where the 90+ million households who pay to watch our programming via cable/satellite/telco will ultimately receive maximum benefit. They can watch live, via DVR, on VOD, online, or through one of the various tablet apps that allow in-home viewing.

We are actively in negotiations with all cable/satellite/telco providers regarding authentication of their customers. We hope to announce several more agreements before the start of the new television season in mid-September.

We are pursuing a strategy where the 90+ million households who pay to watch our programming via cable/satellite/telco will ultimately receive maximum benefit.

The effect was found in the top 5% at a rate similar to the general distribution, providing evidence for the first time that the entire curve is likely increasing at a constant rate. The effect was also found for females as well as males, appears to still be continuing, is primarily concentrated on the mathematics subtests of the SAT, ACT, and EXPLORE, and operates similarly for both 5th and 6th as well as 7th graders in the right tail.

The question, of course, is what this stimulation might consist of? It obviously has to be extremely widespread, since the IQ gains exist at the population level. One frequently cited factor is the increasing complexity of entertainment, which might enhance abstract problem solving skills. (As Flynn himself noted, “The very fact that children are better and better at IQ test problems logically entails that they have learned at least that kind of problem-solving skill better, and it must have been learned somewhere.”) This suggests that, because people are now forced to make sense of Lost or the Harry Potter series or World of Warcraft, they’re also better able to handle hard logic puzzles.

"I asked Dish Network's PR department for a list of the 200 HD channels, numbered from 1 to 200. Not too surprising, the company was evasive, saying the 200 HD channels could be found at its web site. However, when I told them I could not locate more than around 130 HD channels listed at DishNetwork.com, the company's PR department got even more evasive -- and started to act a bit strange. At one point, a company spokeswoman said she could give me a breakdown of the 200 HD channels on "background only," meaning I couldn't attribute the information to Dish Network."

As it turns out, Dish's marketing department had gotten creative -- and was suddenly counting 57 different On Demand movie titles as"channels" (the Alvin & The Chipmunks 2 channel, anyone?) and just hoped that nobody would notice. So instead of being seen as the TV operator that offers the most HD channels, Dish Network is now being seen as the TV operator who assumes everybody is stupid, which we'll assume wasn't what the company's PR department was aiming for.