By Lisa Beilfuss
Time Warner Inc.'s Home Box Office unit said Tuesday that its
stand-alone streaming service HBO Now is available to users of
Apple Inc. products and customers of Cablevision Systems Corp.'s
Optimum Online.
About 2,000 titles are available through the service for $14.99
a month. The company is offering a 30-day free trial to customers
who sign up in April. The launch comes in time for the premiere of
the fifth season of "Game of Thrones" on Sunday.
HBO said it continues to be in discussions with its existing
network of distributors and new digital partners to offer HBO
Now.
Apple users can view HBO Now via an app for the iPhone, iPad or
iPod Touch or on Apple TV using iTunes. Optimum Online subscribers
can access the service through an app after an HBO Now subscription
is ordered.
Cablevision struck a deal last month to offer its nearly three
million broadband customers HBO's streaming service, a week after
HBO announced that Apple would be its exclusive digital partner for
launching the service.
By offering itself outside the pay-TV bundle, HBO must balance
tapping a new market of what it estimates are 10 million households
that have broadband but not pay-TV, without inducing existing
pay-TV subscribers to drop their bundles.
To try to prevent this cannibalization, HBO has priced its HBO
Now service roughly on par with what it costs to add HBO to a
traditional pay-TV subscription.
Write to Lisa Beilfuss at lisa.beilfuss@wsj.com
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