Or maybe you aren't privy to the numbers that Universal and HBO are? HBO is in my limited experience (from talking to them when I was at iTunes) a very, very, v

Or maybe you aren't privy to the numbers that Universal and HBO are? HBO is in my limited experience (from talking to them when I was at iTunes) a very, very, very smart company and I wouldn't expect them to make bad strategic decisions. The number of people who do not have TV service (myself among them) is utterly insignificant in comparison to those that do; but even more important, carriage agreements and the cable business model are such that a la carte purchases of content just don't make sense; for the studio to make their money back, they'd have to be charging you $80/90 a month, per channel.