Cable/satellite is basically the sales & promotion department of HBO. Providers give away months of free HBO at their own expense. They have sales & customer se

Cable/satellite is basically the sales & promotion department of HBO. Providers give away months of free HBO at their own expense. They have sales & customer service reps up selling HBO aggressively. Providers do direct mailings, billboards, etc to promote HBO. Why would they give this up? They're going to use the same strategy to push HBO GO via cable/telco video providers. When HBO finally does make the shift to a standalone IP service it's going to look a lot more like Netflix than the iTunes Store. HBO doesn't want to sell you a couple episodes or even an entire series. They want to sell you the entire HBO service every single month. They will continue to stagger their original programing so you are enticed to keep the service instead of canceling after your favorite show is done for the season. They will mix in older catalog titles with newer titles to keep programming costs under control. They will continue using the HBO service's popularity as a platform for launching new original programming. The fact that no one else has been able to pull off the HBO model via IP yet is a pretty good indication that HBO has time to gracefully make the shift to IP on their own terms. Netflix is trying but they don't have the original programming yet and that's a huge part of HBO's success.