AppleTV + HBO a la carte = happy Chuck

Note.  After I moved to Green Island in 2010, I had to make some financial choices in my life.  Gone were the days when I could afford several different premium channels on my cable television subscription; now I was a single man with my own income and I had to make ends meet.

So I went without.  I discontinued the HBO and Showtime premium channels from my Time Warner Cable subscription.  I mean, honestly, the only thing that ever appealed to me from those channels was Game of Thrones, and I was more than content to wait until the episodes came out on DVD or were made available on my AppleTV unit.

Plus, Time Warner Cable’s usual shenanigans – of which I’ve chronicled many times in the blog – really dissuaded me from adding those services back to my cable bill.

So yesterday’s Apple news made me very happy.  I’m really excited that AppleTV will offer an HBO channel that is independent from my cable subscription.

For $14.99/month, I can get my own HBO channel, I can watch any and all of HBO’s vast library of television shows and movies, all without having to send any additional pennies to Time Warner Cable.

A la carte channel subscriptions.

Do you know how exciting this is?

Let’s put it this way.  How many of you would, if you had the opportunity, pay for only the television channels that you watch?

Well, right now with your cable bill, you’re paying for channels that you would never watch.  Trust me.  If I could save a few dollars by trimming away 50 channels on my current cable subscription, I would do it in a second.

There has been a growing movement for people to request an a la carte cable bill – purchasing only the channels you want to watch.  Heck, you could do part of this right now if you went with Netflix and HuluPlus.  You could do this if you subscribe to the WWE Network as well, you could watch every single wrestling match from the dawn of time, with the exception of that King Kong Bundy / Primo Canera III match from Schenectady where Bundy went to the second rope, came down for a knee drop and broke the ring floor.

But now one of the big cable channels – Home Box Office – is allowing viewers to cut the coaxial umbilical cord.

So maybe I don’t have to block all the spoilers from Game of Thrones until it comes out a year later on DVD.  And maybe I can check out some of these new programs that everybody’s talking about – shows like Girls and Silicon Valley and Six Feet Under and all the others.   I don’t have to rely on YouTube clips to watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.  I don’t have to act like I know what’s going on when everybody else is trying to figure out the plotline of True Detective.  I don’t have to politely say no to someone who offers to provide me with whole seasons of Boardwalk Empire that they’ve downloaded from BitTorrent.

Hey, I don’t even know how “exclusive” this deal with AppleTV will be; perhaps in a few months this service will be offered on other smart TV or streaming services.  Don’t know, don’t care.

All I care about at this point in time is that I’m not only getting to watch what I want, and to control how I watch it, but also to determine how much I will pay a cable television channel to watch a certain program.

That definitely works for me.

Because for me, the AppleTV + HBO news is more exciting than that new whiz-bang wristwatch they’re offering that isn’t even compatible with my BlackBerry.