HBO Soundly Rejects "TakeMyMoneyHBO.com" Plea To Allow Non-Subscribers To Stream Their Shows

With the massive success of Game Of Thrones (and the rapid rise of HBO's cable subscriber only streaming service HBOGo), a huge chorus of fans of shows like Thrones and True Blood have recently been bombarding the premium cable giant with requests for some way to watch their shows online without being a cable based HBO subscriber. Every year since the use of streaming sites like Netflix and Hulu became wide spread, more and more people are "cutting the cord" and ditching the massive expense of cable TV service, in favor of using the internet to satiate their TV show fix.

Now, as I'm sure a commenter would probably have pointed out, the internet already holds many avenues of questionable legality on which people can access the latest TV episodes (laws on that sort of thing are different in every country). For the purposes of this article though, we're focusing on the large group of people who would prefer to legally experience their entertainment.

With that (disclaimer?) out of the way, a website with the attention grabbing name of TakeMyMoneyHBO.com hit the web on Tuesday night, and has already garnered tons of press. The site was created by a man named Jake Caputo, and implores HBO to offer non cable subscribers a legal way to stream the network's latest original series. Caputo openly admits to past pirating of HBO's shows, and borrowing friends' login passwords for HBOGo, but would like nothing more than to be able to pay a monthly fee for legal online access. Visitors to the website are invited to type in a dollar amount that they would be comfortable paying per month for HBO streaming, and each number is then tweeted directly to the official HBOGo twitter account.

HBO has since responded to the website via Twitter - "Love the love for HBO. Keep it up. For now, @RyanLawler @TechCrunch has it right.” The aforementioned TechCrunch posting features the author coming to the conclusion that any new revenue generated from an online offering wouldn't come close to matching the losses HBO would suffer in canceled cable subscriptions. If HBO agrees with this stance, then it's obvious that it has no plans to expand HBOGo to non cable customers anytime in the foreseeable future.

Do you think HBO should offer its content to non cable subscribers, or do you agree that it would cripple their business model?

Source: EW.com

Note: To the commenter below, I looked into what you said, and it unfortunately appears that you still need to be an HBO cable subscriber to use the XBOX service.