HBO wants standalone streaming in time for Game of Thrones
Fortune.com is reporting that HBO wants their new standalone streaming service to be ready for April, in time for it to ride Game of Thrones’ success.
As you may remember, the original announcement stated that HBO’s plan was to offer their in house streaming service HBO GO as a stand alone. (It was codenamed “Project Maui.”) That’s no longer quite what we will be getting. Instead the channel had decided to go with an external company which will provide the technology framework for HBO to use for streaming. That company, MLB Advanced, was originally was created to stream for Major League Baseball. It has since then expanded and now also provides the framework for other such stand alone streaming channels as the WWE Network. With this move, HBO will become their largest client to date.
From the memo:
HBO executive management has made a decision to pursue an external solution for the product that was being built by the Maui team. This decision was not made lightly, and was based on an assessment of risk and scope of the product needed to meet HBO’s short term business needs for April 2015. This was not a judgment of the team’s work quality or deliverables but rather a bet that an existing streaming service could deliver the needed product faster and at lower risk than Maui. This means that effective today the Maui project is cancelled.
As for why HBO is switching away from their original plan to do it all in house with HBO GO like they’d originally planned, and are now swapping to an external client with only four months until their target date, the story in Fortune reads like the machinations in King’s Landing. HBO GO’s Otto Berkes is accused in the article of building “a Napoleonic empire within HBO.” There’s suggestions that the outages HBO GO suffered last year during Game of Thrones run were a deliberate way to get more money for the streaming department, and even a quote saying that HBO GO was a place where backstabbing is done “with a smile.” I’m sure Cersei would be surprised to hear backstabbing happens any other way.
The memo makes it clear that the timing of this project is based around Game of Thrones launch schedule.
The larger technology team now has three core missions.
1. Our top priority: Fully support the work needed to enable the external solution for April. To begin this work we have asked a small forward group to engage and assess with the external partner and get to a detailed statement of work as quickly as possible. Once that SoW is complete we will staff to meet our deliverables.
2. A large portion of Maui’s effort can be repurposed for HBO GO, a top priority for HBO. We will continue to make HBO GO the best global capable streaming service available. This means that we redouble and focus our efforts, first for the April timeframe with our scale and robustness goals for Game of Thrones, and second with our longer term plan to deploy Hurley, and a suite of Hadron clients as quickly as possible. We will also fold as much as possible of the good work done for Maui into HBO GO where we can.
With HBO decision to move to an external client, Berkes has resigned his position, and HBO GO’s future is up in the air. As for the new streaming service, even moving away from HBO GO doesn’t guarantee an easy launch. WWE Network suffered outages, slow buffering and had a tendency to crash in the first few weeks of launch last spring, as the technology raced to keep up with the influx of users. But if they can get it off the ground in time, and the first month isn’t a PR disaster, HBO has a real chance to pull an iTunes and start bringing into the fold all those thousands upon thousands who make this show the “most pirated program” every year.
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