My cable provider had an crazy discount on their HBO+OnDemand offering, so I bought it and I had complete access to nearly every HBO show and more for 2 years.

My cable provider had an crazy discount on their HBO+OnDemand offering, so I bought it and I had complete access to nearly every HBO show and more for 2 years. I ended up torrenting either entire seasons or torrenting last night's episode because: - The interface was painful to use. If I watched 2 eps of a show one night, and returned the next night, the box didn't remember where I was, so I would have to search up the show using the remote without a keyboard, scroll through an extremely slow UI of giant show posters that looked exactly the same and didn't show the episode number until I selected it. And that list would lead to another list, and every time I selected something, it took approximately 5-10 seconds to load the next page. - It was "HD" meaning it was outputting 1080p to my TV, but there was a ton of color banding, dark scenes had really obvious compression squares, etc. - Newly aired shows would usually not appear until the next day, and sometimes they would appear, then disappear for a few hours, then reappear. The stated goal was to have the shows available right away, but something about the infra prevented them from reliably doing it. - Once in a while I would be going through an old season, and some random episode, like the second episode of the season, would simply disappear from the list for a day or two. - Maybe this is a Canada-only/CTV problem, but there were several CTV shows I tried to watch that had rewind/fastforward COMPLETELY DISABLED, presumably to prevent commercial skipping (because they had commercials in their OnDemand shows). If you watched a show halfway, and decided to come back and watch from that point, CTV said "f* you, watch the whole thing again." In cable company's defense, the interface to all this was very pretty. They were iteratively updating it too and very slowly making the OnDemand menus just a little more easy to use, so it wasn't some old garbage that never changed. But the sheer number of actions I had to take to watch a single episode made me join a private TV tracker, where I reliably got extremely high quality video immediately after airings, and entire seasons neatly packaged in folders.