HBO has taken the first wobbly steps into the digital distribution age with its new online service. Making my ‘no media’ prediction more and more a reality all the time. HBO gets an ‘A’ for effort but falls way short in its actual implementation. With plenty of good things to watch online HBO needs to romance me away from the competition not bring its walled garden to the information age. I am fine with paying for HBO I didn’t expect them to make their service free when they launched an online version. What I do expect by now is a better roll-out of services like this. HBO (a Time Warner company) is only launching the service on Time Warner cable (at first).

There are just a few minor serious hangups…

1. You have to have your broadband access through Time Warner. I thought we where past this kind of stuff. This smacks of “If we are gonna use my kickball I get to be the pitcher”.
2. You have to be in one of the test markets Green Bay, Milwaukee or Wisconsin. None of the free open beta stuff Hulu is pack’n.
3. No Macs or Linux boxes.
4. 400 hour limit on downloads. This seems silly but I guess its to keep someone from OpenHuluing them.
5. Time Warner givith and Time Warner taketh away. With bandwidth caps in the works on cable connections services like this are designed to get you over the limit to charge you for a higher tier price.

All in all another good day for digital distribution.

*Update*

An interesting note from Paul Miller over at Engadget Vudu has dropped their price to stay competitive with the new Apple TV from $399 to $295. More good new for Digital Distribution.

In my last post about the HD DVD vs. Blue Ray There Are No True Winners In This Format War [HD DVD vs. Blue-Ray] I didn’t mention much about my personal plan. Funny since it is likely of particular interest to those who read this blog. I will be (and have been) skipping this Blue-Ray vs. HD DVD and going right for digital download.

I’m not the only one to notice that no media at all is the next gen format. Netflix has been slowly easing us into digital downloads culminating in their unlimited movie downloads on most packages and a set top digital download box. Hulu (NBC and Fox) allows people to watch nearly commercial free (while in beta, expect commercials to increase when it is finished) first run TV shows from their PC.

The future of media is no media at all, its digital distribution. We have already laid the pipes to deliver this content do we really need a Read Only Memory of some type? Do we really need to keep poking smaller holes in foil? Hard disks are getting cheaper all the time cheap enough to use as a place to stash your collection. Even cheap enough to keep it secure from data loss with a RAID (most new motherboards support hardware RAID right out of the box huge raid diagram right).

Much more how I am currently implementing this after the fold.

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