Hbo Now requires and apple, android, or Amazon device to sign up for some reason. Once registered you can watch through hbonow.com on your laptop. Very weird but that is how it works. Still no support for Chromecast or roku devices.

I managed to talk comcast onto giving me Hbo along with my Internet for a nice promotional price (50 a month for a year) so I am using Hbo Go (which requires a cable subscription to hbo) for now. Why they decided to roll a totally new service in Hbo now instead of piggy backing on the already perfectly functional Hbo go service is beyond me.

Why they decided to roll a totally new service in Hbo now instead of piggy backing on the already perfectly functional Hbo go service is beyond me.

Because describing HBOGo as "perfectly functional" is vastly overstating what it actually delivers? Their servers can barely handle paid subscribers and mooching family members, let alone a whole nother crowd of non-cable subscribers.

Seems like server side upgrades could fix that rather than an entirely new front end that requires entirely new front end implementation on dozens of already supported devices for Hbo go. But I admit to not knowing the back end details.

I have never tried to watch anything on Hbo go until 24 hours after release and it has consistently been as good or better quality than Netflix for me. The apps interface is odd (no clear way to easily binge watch a tv series) but it exists. Maybe starting over completely is easier than fixing it's issues but I find that odd is all. Like it is intentionally designed to discourage people who have already gotten used to Hbo go from switching...

Maybe HBOgo was not clean client server, meaning the interface and server side were integrated (which would be truly awful coding). Not saying they did that but most banks run legacy systems because of that very problem - their systems were designed before client servers, and when they upgraded to SQL backends, they resorted to all sorts of kludges to make it work with the existing code - which ended up with even less maintainable code than before.

I'm not an expert on the details, but HBO Go is run entirely in-house, and HBO Now is operated by MLB Networks - for Now, HBO provides the content, but none of the infrastructure. And MLB is actually set up to handle a full-on streaming television network (vs a nice-to-have add-on to a cable subscription), so no more freeze-frames and random aspect-ratio switches just because Game of Thrones is on.

Like it is intentionally designed to discourage people who have already gotten used to Hbo go from switching...

Yes, but this part is about money, not technology - they still need their cable partners and don't want to make it look like they're encouraging cord-cutting. If they limit you to signing up on a tablet, they can plausibly deny that HBO Now users are watching it on their televisions.

That all makes sense. At the moment I'm still glad I have a cheap Hbo go account though as the missing features of Hbo now would frustrate me no end.

Question about home media set-up:

I have a LG HDTV that's about 5 years old (this one, I think). It's got a couple of USB slots and 3 HDMI ports. I have 1) a TiVo Premiere with a lifetime subscription connected to the TV via a receiver. It's a nice enough set-up -- TiVo works like a box for streaming media, so in addition to being a DVR, it lets me connect to Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, which are basically all I need for streaming content.

The only thing is, I have quite a bit of downloaded media file on my desktop PC (which is on the opposite side of the living room). It's connected to the Router that's sitting next to my TV by a super-long eternet cable. To have media files on my computer play on my TV, I have a Zotac Zbox connected to the router and the receiver -- it's basically a mini computer that lets me see the desktop content via home network and play it on my TV. The Zbox is now a few years old and wasn't that powerful to start with, and video playback is now super-slow and stuttery.

It's kind of a messy way to have PC video content play on TV to start with. Rather than getting a new mini-media player PC, I'm looking for an alternative. Roku box gets a lot of rave reviews, but I don't really need it because TiVO does most of the things it's known for (plus Roku is apparently not great for playing downloaded video files from PC?). I've heard mixed things about WD TV Live. And Chromecast would basically only play streaming video content from online, not a saved video files from a folder, right? My media files are not anything fancy -- mostly in .avi or .mp4, a handful of .mkv files (but mostly they're standard definition files). Anyone has recs on what might be a good device to get?

You can stream saved video files from a folder to your TV using Chromecast. [link]

Groupon has the Chromecast dongle for cheap [link]

Yay! That *would* be the simplest and cheapest option for sure if it can do that. Thanks!

Chromecast is good but my favorite is an Amazon Fire TV Stick with SPMC (an of shoot of XBMC) side loaded. It takes a bit of work to get set up but there are good walkthroughs and the XBMC interface is by far the best way to interact with media files. And it is powerful for the size: plays my very high quality HD bluray rips with DD and DTS sound over WiFi from my network share with no issues.

Chromecast doesn't do surround sound well and personally I like a physical remote. But if that isn't an issue it works well too.