HBO Go is currently only available directly to Verizon FiOS customers. Comcast customers have access through Fancast, and Time Warner Cable indicated it wasn't interested in participating in HBO Go, for now.

HBO subscribers who are also Verizon FiOS TV customers are the first to get access to the premium channel’s new online video portal — HBO Go, launched Wednesday with over 600 hours of HBO programming, available free to authenticated HBO and FiOS subscribers.

HBO Go is another project spawned from the cable and pay television industry’s TV Everywhere project — putting television programming online for anytime viewing, for free, as long as you maintain a cable or pay television subscription.

Ironically, the service launched Wednesday on Verizon’s telco-TV service FiOS, leaving lots of cable subscribers waiting for access.  If you subscribe to HBO through cable, satellite, or U-verse, the service remains unavailable to you, for now.  Comcast subscribers already had access to HBO’s programming through the Fancast Xfinity TV website.  If you don’t pay for television, the service remains unavailable to you indefinitely — they won’t sell it to you at any price.

“Ultimately this is about extending the subscriber lifecycle,” HBO co-president Eric Kessler said. “It’s more about subscriber retention.”

Subscriber retention through incumbent providers, he means.  HBO doesn’t want to risk selling direct to online consumers who might want to cut ties with their cable or other pay television provider.

Stop the Cap! reader Jared has FiOS and HBO and let us sample the service through his FiOS connection (his 25Mbps/25Mbps connection with remote access maxed out our Road Runner Turbo connection and still left him plenty of leftover speed).

Let’s start with the viewing experience.

It’s a big improvement over HBO’s Wisconsin trial in 2008 with Time Warner Cable, which required viewers to download Windows Media-encoded video files protected with Microsoft’s annoying digital rights management scheme.  It was cumbersome for trial participants, and dealing with Microsoft’s player and DRM cut Mac owners out of the trial.

HBO Go is Flash-based, using Adobe’s Real-Time Messaging Protocol to keep viewers from saving permanent copies for themselves (and potentially their friends.)  Using Verizon FiOS, viewers should rarely encounter any artifacts or speed-related viewing problems.  The picture was fine, even for me using remote access software. Of course, if your Internet connection is considerably slower than FiOS or your neighborhood suffers from online congestion, you could experience issues streaming HD content, but HBO Go is designed to buffer when encountering slower connections.  The files are encoded in MPEG-4 at 1.2Mbps and 2.6Mbps, which theoretically should be fine for the majority of viewers.  Comcast subscribers – remember watching counts against your usage cap.

Wandering around the HBO Go library was simple  — easier to navigate and less cluttered than Hulu.  The site was intuitive and should be easy to use for just about everyone.

Up to three members of your household can each watch programming from the service at the same time, even away from home, anywhere in the country.

HBO Go claims to be a work in progress — about 25% of the content will be refreshed by HBO every week, with new episodes available on the service immediately following their TV premiere.

But the service hardly offers a comprehensive viewing experience.  It’s much closer to Hulu or your cable company’s HBO on Demand service.

For example, rights issues limit virtually all of HBO’s original series to a handful of recent episodes or seasons.  Only The Wire has a complete library to watch from its premiere forward.  Curb Your Enthusiasm, aptly named when considering HBO Go, is missing completely.  So is Real Time with Bill Maher, although four of his earlier specials are archived on the site.

As for movies, there are gaping holes there as well.  Available titles resemble Cinemax’s selection of movies you’ve already seen.  There are gaps between what you can watch on HBO itself and what is available on HBO Go.  Babe is online, for instance, but anything Harry Potter isn’t.

In other words, what could have been a compelling addition for HBO subscribers feels redundant.  I would never pay anything extra for HBO Go, nor will it be a factor in keeping HBO.

Online viewers need not apply.

HBO could have used the opportunity to sell the service to non-cable subscribers for a monthly fee and pick up some additional revenue, but that wouldn’t sit well with the pay television cartel that is behind the TV Everywhere concept.  They don’t want you cord cutting — those that have are locked out of the HBO Go Clubhouse.  For now, I suspect few were clamoring to get in.

Comcast has formally announced their version of TV Everywhere is now online.  Fancast XFINITY TV “is available to any Comcast customer with a digital cable and Internet subscription.”  There is no additional charge for the service.

Comcast customers can access the service after logging in through Comcast.net or Fancast.com with their account username and password.  Once “authenticated” as a confirmed Comcast cable subscriber, customers can watch approximately 2,000 hours of programming from more than 30 cable networks, including premium channels HBO, Cinemax, and Starz.  A demonstration showed Comcast had complete seasons of series like The Sopranos and Big Love.

Some programmers are exploring whether Nielsen can count online viewing as part of its ratings measurements.

Initially, Comcast will restrict access to customers who are confirmed digital cable and broadband customers, but will extend the service to those who only subscribe to Comcast cable programming in approximately six months once security and authentication issues have been resolved, according to company officials.

The service should be accessible by subscribers on-the-go through mobile broadband or other connections, as long as customers log in.  Access is not allowed outside of the United States for copyright clearance reasons.

Customers should be aware any video accessed by the service counts against Comcast’s 250GB monthly usage limit.  Advertising on the service also counts.  Unlike Hulu which typically provides just one advertisement for every break, Comcast’s program partners have tested full commercial loads, up to seven minutes worth in a 30-minute program.  That’s 14 ads to sit through, each eating into your usage allowance.  Comcast says programmers are individually testing different amounts of advertising to learn how viewers react.  The prevailing view is that online viewers are less tolerant of advertising than typical television viewers.

Subscription television providers should relax: Americans are not moving away from watching television on television sets.  Nielsen’s Three Screen Report, issued today, finds most Americans are not fundamentally changing the way they watch TV — they are simply taking advantage of more convenient ways to watch.

The report shows considerable year over year growth in terms of time spent for Digital Video Recorder viewing (up 21.1%) and online video (up 34.9%) since the fall of 2008. Given the consistent spike in usage among the three screens of television, Internet and mobile, consumers are clearly adding video platforms to their schedule, rather than replacing them.

“Americans today have an insatiable appetite for not only content, but also choice,” says Nic Covey, director of cross-platform insights at Nielsen. “Across all age groups, we see consumers adding the Internet and mobile devices to their media diet — consuming media anytime and anywhere possible.”

Nearly 99% of television viewing is spent watching it on a television set, according to Nielsen’s findings.  But consumers are also discovering broadband and mobile viewing can add convenient new options, and are taking advantage of them:

• In 3Q09, the average American watched 31 hours of TV per week, with 31 minutes spent in playback mode with their DVR.
• In addition, each week the average consumer spent 4 hours on the Internet and 22 minutes watching online video.
• The average consumer spent 3 minutes watching mobile video each week.

The biggest fans of mobile video are teenagers, some spending just over seven hours per month watching video on their phones.  Watching television on a broadband connection is a popular trend among those aged 18-44, one noticed by Comcast chief operating officer Steve Burke.  Burke spoke about the trend at the recent Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing’s three day conference in Denver.  He noted his own children now prefer to watch their shows on a laptop from one of the free online services and not on the family television.

Allowing young viewers to grow up assuming they can watch anything, anywhere, for potentially no charge is a very dangerous proposition for people in Burke’s business.

“An entire generation is growing up with that preference,” Burke said. “If we don’t do something to change that behavior so they respect copyrights on the side of content provider, and cable subscriptions or satellite subscriptions or telco subscriptions on the side of the distributors, we are going to wake up with a lot of ingrained habits going the wrong way and we will see cord-cutting.”

Comcast has two ways to make sure viewers learn their lessons about paying for what they watch:

1. The formalized introduction of the forthcoming usage meter, better enforcing Comcast’s 250GB monthly limit for their broadband service.  Watching a lot of online video will take a major bite out of your broadband usage allowance.
2. The launch of Comcast’s Fancast Xfinity TV, a service that will allow only existing Comcast cable-TV package subscribers access to many of their favorite shows online, on demand, for no additional charge.  That new name comes courtesy of Comcast’s marketing gurus, to replace what readers better know as: TV Everywhere.
   

The usage meter and “authenticated subscribers-only” pay wall are Comcast’s one-two punch to keep subscribers from eventually dropping their cable-TV package to watch television exclusively over their broadband connection.

Cable operators already treat companies like Netflix, which use broadband to deliver an increasing number of movies and TV shows on-demand to subscribers, as a major threat.  Insight Communications CEO Jamie Howard called Netflix the equivalent of the third largest cable operator in the country in terms of content delivered.  That’s content not owned or directly managed by Insight or other cable providers.

Some in the industry believe who owns and controls online video will eventually decide the winners and losers in the subscription television business.  Derrick Frost, founder and CEO of Invision.TV, an Internet video search engine, warned the outcome of the battle can’t come soon enough.  Otherwise, consumers “will find other ways — legally or illegally — to access it.”