TV Dinners or À La Carte? HBO To Offer Programs Directly to Consumers

HBO's decision to offer households the option to subscribe directly to the network starting sometime in 2015 may shake up the way we consume entertainment. Currently, watching HBO generally requires a subscription to a cable network. Noting that there are over 80 million individuals who currently do not subscribe to HBO, the network believes that it can make a dent in that number by attracting cord cutters - that is, those who have dropped their cable subscriptions. Those who no longer subscribe to cable often cite the high cost of a subscription relative to the few stations that are actually watched. It will be interesting to see where the sweet spot is - will people subscribe to so many individual networks that it will cost more than a cable subscription? That remains to be seen. HBO has been a mainstay in the cable industry for decades, so the fact that it is changing its service model is significant. It is not the first network to be offered to viewers à la carte - Netflix and Hulu, for example, are both currently available without cable subscriptions.