Apple fans aren’t the only ones who have had an exciting week for news — cord cutters now have reason to cheer as well. Quartz reports that Jeff Bewkes, the CEO of HBO parent company Time Warner, told an investment conference this week that his company is “seriously considering” whether it wants to start offering HBO Go as a standalone subscription option that people can subscribe to without having cable TV. While Bewkes didn’t full commit to fulfilling cord cutters’ dreams, he did go much farther than he ever has toward saying HBO Go might be a standalone option sometime in the future.
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“The broadband opportunity is getting quite a bit bigger, and the ability of the plant to deliver something robust is getting stronger,” Bewkes said. “What we’re trying to do is basically make sure that we’ve done everything we can with our distributors to take advantage and have them take advantage of what customers they could have. And we’ve got to keep looking actively. We’re seriously considering what is the best way to deal with online distribution, but I don’t have anything to announce about it today.”
Although cable companies are loathe to admit it, the future of television really is online distribution where viewers can subscribe to the channels they want without having to pay outrageous monthly sums for hundreds of channels that they never watch. Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam earlier this week said that younger people are increasingly watching TV more through Internet through services such as Netflix instead of through traditional cable packages and he said that anyone who didn’t understand that this was going to get left behind.
