HBO Go Now On Amazon Fire TV Boxes (Not So Fast, Comcast Customers)
Amazon announced today that HBO Go is now available for the Fire TV box and will be coming to the less-expensive, recently released Fire TV stick sometime this spring.
While this still requires that you have a basic cable subscription and a subscription to HBO (or that you have someone willing to lend you their login info), it can be a money-saver for people with multi-TV homes who don’t feel like paying the cable company for additional cable boxes.
Perhaps that’s why not every cable provider is on board yet. According to the HBO Go/Fire TV activation page, most of the major pay-TV players — DirecTV, Dish, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Verizon FiOS, AT&T U-Verse — are allowing customers to stream HBO Go this way, there are two huge omissions: Comcast and Charter.
Because you have have to use your pay-TV operator’s login info to access HBO Go, it’s up to each provider to determine which devices you’re allowed to watch the service on. As many a Roku buyer has learned over the years, not every provider is too eager to let people get a free add-on service that may take away the ancillary revenue of additional set-top boxes or lead to cord-cutting when HBO finally releases its long-awaited standalone streaming option.
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