GearWERKZ TechBlog

Yesterday, a crop of new HBO content hit the Apple store, and much of it is now being offered in HD. Do not get your hopes up of completing your digital collection of certain series, however, as much of the content has gaps, and not all of it is available in HD from series start to finish. For example, Entourage Seasons 1 through 7 are available, however the first two seasons are only available in SD.

Follow up:

HBO content first came to the iTunes Store back in 2008, and back then the most current programming was going for $2.99 an episode, while other content was $1.99. HBO content in HD is going for $2.99 in the iTunes Store now, with SD programming available for $1.99. A pretty decent variety is available and includes many of HBO's top shows. Entourage, True Blood, The Wire, Rome, Flight of the Conchords, The Sopranos, Deadwood, and Oz are all part of the current iTunes HBO offerings. Not all of these are available in HD; you'll have to hit the store yourself to see if your favorite show has been given the 720p or higher love.

I have DVDs of True Blood and the Sopranos that I have not gotten around to watching yet. And I have Deadwood in my NetFlix queue, as well as Flight of the Conchords, which the wife and I have been watching infrequently. I have not been traveling much, but I know that having content available on mobile platforms normally results in me watching more of it. It will probably not happen right away, but I can see myself picking up some HBO series that are on my "interested" list, like Entourage and Rome, via iTunes.

While this is good news, it would be nicer to have to option to view some of these shows via HBO GO, which is HBO's mobile app, available on both iOS and Android. However, HBO will not let you access this content a-la-carte as a stand-alone subscription. You have to be a Cable TV subscriber with an HBO subscription to be able to access the HBO GO content. Even then, your specific cable provider has to be part of the consortium whose customers are allowed to access the full menu. Time Warner, the corporate owners of HBO, are continuing to defend their turf with arcane licensing schemes like these. Additionally, they are rumored to be part of the hold-up associated with getting Apple's cloud services fully in place for all associated content. Yay for making persistent content available in the store for download and storage to a hard drive or mobile device. Boo for not making the content available on-demand and on-the-go without multiple entanglements.

Source: MacRumors