It's not Xbox Live, It's HBO

You can get HBOGo on the Boxee, but it requires that you already have a sub to HBO via some cable or dish. I suspect it will be the same way here.

It is a little confusing - the announcement - is this just for Verizon subscribers?

*Coming Soon. Check back for additional details. Xbox LIVE Gold membership and additional subscriptions required (such as EPIX, UFC, Hulu Plus and Netflix), (Comcast Xfinity, HBO GO, and Verizon require an Xbox LIVE Gold membership and an additional TV subscrpition and internet from that provider.), ESPN on Xbox LIVE requires a Xbox LIVE Gold membership and ESPN3 affiliated broadband provider. See ESPN3.com for providers. PPV and on-demand content sold separately. Kinect functionality and voice search available with select Xbox LIVE content and varies by feature, provider, and region.

Fine print, in almost white text, at the bottom of the page.

Looks like we’re still stuck with ESPN3. What garbage. I guess when I have a hankering for College Candlepin Bowling, Junior Equestrian Championships, or the WNBA, I won’t have to go far~

It is useful there – instead of waiting for HBO to re-run that show you want to watch, just choose it off the menu and watch it now. It’s like a super-DVR, where you don’t need to have a box recording bits as they come in, but can instead have them sent to you when you want them.

And I’m sure the companies think of these as supplementary services that are a nice add-on to their core cable business, which is why they only offer them in a useless fashion.

So yeah, as expected, this is a feature that is only of some small use to people who are already paying for legacy TV, and not anything genuinely interesting.

So we can look forward to :
Someone is logged in with my gamertag watching Boardwalk Empire and all my spacebucks are gone. It says I spent them on On-Demand porn movies. I called Xbox Live Support and they said they deactivated my account, but someone is still online with it. They said it would take 30 days and I won’t get my MS Points back. Fuck MS Live TV!

Well, I just lost all interest in this. I guess I’ll just wait for HBO shows to hit dvd/bluray and pick’em up that way.

I’ll be excited when they add MLB.TV. Until then it’s just the same thing I get on Comcast now. Only it uses my monthly allotment of bandwidth.

Awesome! Another terrible offering from morons.

The ESPN3 thing is awesome. I dont subscribe to ESPN (I just get the broadcast channels and internet from Comcast), but I have been able to watch a TON of college football games in HD this year through the service. I am not sure I would use it when college football is not in season, but I would hold it up as an example of how the major networks and the big sports leagues should be showing the rest of college and pro games.

That said, I totally agree that requiring an HBO cable package to use HBO on the Xbox is an awful idea. I would love to pay HBO directly for their content…

Are you being serious? ESPN3 is awesome. I actually get to watch Vandy play, even though I live in Ohio. Love ESPN3.

I’m holding out for ESPN 8.

That’s not much different than how it is with ESPN 3. To get ESPN 3, your cable internet provider has to have ESPN as one of their partners. So it sounds like it’s basically the same thing here. If you already have cable with ESPN, you get ESPN3, whether on the xbox or computer. If you have HBO cable package, you get this HBO on the xbox.

I do agree it I rather just pay HBO the $15-20 for their package versus buying a cable package than another HBO package but alas it’s not to be.

The difference appears to be that I dont need to pay for ESPN in order to use ESPN3. All I have is the “broadcast” tier of channels, which they basically give you for free when you have internet. However, I have access to ESPN3.

HBO GO is saying that I already need to have HBO to use it.

Tivo doesn’t work with Comcast’s on-demand service, so I’ve never had access to it. I wonder if it’ll be adequate enough to make netflix streaming unnecessary.

Blah blah blah, thanks for nothing Time Warner…

I suppose that would depend on what you use Netflix for. OnDemand will have recently aired shows for channels in your package, maybe the whole current season, but little older than that, and the movies will constantly change based on what they have in their current rotation on the channels. i.e. If no channel is currently airing Avatar, you can’t watch Avatar OnDemand for free (though you may be able to pay a rental price for it).

I haven’t looked at ESPN 3 in a while but I hit it up several times last year when it first came out, and it was basically short Sportscenter clips, 2 week old hockey games, WNBA, and obscure Wide World of Sports type stuff. I give zero shits about college sports so if they added NCAA it still has no appeal to me, but I acknowledge there is a good audience for that.

I have HBO, but my cable company (RCN) doesn’t like HBO Go for some reason, so I can’t use it. HBO tells me to pressure my cable company. Feh.

So I won’t be able to use HBO Go on XBox Live either. So this announcement is a non-starter for me.

Unless I’m wrong about something.

We get nothing :(

You get free health care. We get HBO Go.

That is the difference between socialism and capitalism.

I hope HBO Go will show HD quality video. I want some Carnivale in HD!