Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, Sex And the City and The Wire are currently "free" in Amazon Prime. At some point those licenses will expire bu

Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, Sex And the City and The Wire are currently "free" in Amazon Prime. At some point those licenses will expire but this illustrates the "innovator's dilemma" as applied to HBO. They have a good business of selling cable subscriptions for new stuff, licensing their past shows to Amazon, Hulu and other willing buyers and selling on-demand access via Apple, Amazon etc. Now they need to compete with Netlifx, which has a large catalog of licensed, popular shows from all over and their own exclusive content. To compete with that HBO would have to drop revenue from licensing (there's less reasons to pay for HBO if I can get a lot of their good stuff elsewhere) Their cable subscriptions are probably going to decline no matter what. Cable subscriber count is on a steady, 6 year decline (http://www.businessinsider.com/cable-tv-subscriber-losses-q2-chart-2017-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/cable-tv-subscriber-losses-q2...) despite being propped by internet + cable bundles. That decline is accelerating i.e. every year more people are cancelling cable as a percentage. If that continues, it'll be a bloodbath. If the decline stops accelerating, it'll still be bloodbath, just later. I don't see a scenario in which cable starts growing again. Netlifx model is easy to explain but almost impossible to replicate. The model is: get so many subscribers from all over the world paying you relatively small amount that you'll be able to outspend any other company in quantity of TV/movie exclusive content, thus making it even more likely to get new subscribers. This is "rich get richer" model and Netflix is already the richest. People will be willing to buy 2-3 such subscriptions so that's how many winning slots there are. So HBO better fight hard for that 2nd or 3rd position, but unfortunately just like BlockBuster or Borders had a good business until they didn't, HBO might not do enough to compete.