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 loves its new name for TV Everywhere so much, it’s expanding it across all of its products and services in the coming months.

XFinity, originally Comcast’s online video on demand service, will now share its name with Comcast’s cable-TV, telephone, and broadband product lines.

The effort to rebrand itself comes at a time when consumers increasingly find blurring lines between services delivering video, telephone and broadband service.  You can watch cable TV programming on your mobile phone, make and receive phone calls over your broadband connection, and watch TV shows online as well.  XFinity could symbolize the convergence of technology, where content is ultimately more important than the way it reaches you.

Comcast’s blog gushed about the ‘exciting proposition’ of an industry game-change:

The folks at Gizmodo are lampooning Comcast's brand change

Today on Comcast’s earnings call Brian Roberts and Steve Burke talked about XFINITY, the new brand for our technology platform and products. Simply put, XFINITY is about offering our customers more — more HD, more speed, more choice and more control over their services. XFINITY is the culmination of years of work to transition Comcast’s network and products to a platform that will now offer 100+ HD channels, 50 to 70 foreign-language channels, approaching 20,000+ VOD choices, incredibly fast Internet speeds (50 Mbps growing to 100+ Mbps) and thousands of TV shows and movies online for our customers to watch whenever and wherever they want.

XFINITY represents the future of our company and it’s a promise to customers that we’ll keep innovating. When we launch XFINITY in a market, we’ll rebrand our products: XFINITY TV, XFINITY Voice and XFINITY Internet (our company, of course, remains Comcast). This transition is already well underway across the country. Next week, XFINITY will roll out in 11 markets including: Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Chicago, Portland, Seattle, Hartford, Augusta, Chattanooga, parts of the Bay Area and San Francisco, with more markets to come later this year.

Of course, consumers don’t have a choice about Comcast’s 250GB monthly usage allowance.

As far as new names go, reaction is decidedly mixed.  The folks at Gizmodo promptly began ridiculing the thin coat of paint applied to an often despised cable provider landscape.  XFinity likely targets a younger audience.  I suspect older subscribers will be perplexed as to its meaning, if not its pronunciation.

This isn’t the first time the industry has tried name-changes.  Cable modem service has long since been rebranded “High Speed Online” by some, “High Speed Internet” by others.  Time Warner Cable calls its bundled services “All the Best.”  Many others call it a “Triple Play.”

For consumers, the name is less important than the quality and price of the service.

Karl Bode of Broadband Reports and I are both glad that Comcast at least avoided the now-cliché “Extreme” in the new name.  I hope they also registered the predictable xxxfinity.com before some porn merchant grabs it.