Take HBO everywhere
Today, HBO Asia launched HBO Go, the company’s wireless streaming service in the Philippines. HBO Go’s premise is simple – it allows you to take HBO’s almost 1000 hours of content with you wherever you go, allowing you to stream Movies and their award winning series on any mobile device, from PCs, tablets to smartphones. The Philippines is the second country in the region to get HBO Go, with Hong Kong being the first.
HBO has teamed up with Sky Cable to bring the service to customers in the Philippines. The service comes free for SKYcable’s HBO PAK subscribers and select SKYbroadband subscribers of HBO, and allows them to connect up to three devices for a single account. Unfortunately, only one device gets to stream HBO’s content at any given time, as simultaneous streaming is not possible.
HBO Go subscribers get dibs on HBO’s original content 12 hours after it airs in US. Aside from that, HBO Go customers will also be able to get access to a plethora of original series by HBO, which include Game of Thrones, The Pacific, Girls and a number of others.
As far as the streaming experience is concerned, it was smooth overall on the devices that were shown to the media during the official launch. Ray Montinola, COO of Sky Cable says that you should have a minimum of 1.5Mbps for the service to work. According to HBO techs present during the event, the app uses adaptive streaming technology to ensure the best user experience as it relates to image quality, which takes into account internet speeds, as well as the size of the display of whatever device is streaming the content. The smoothness of our experience with the service may not be representative of how it works out in the wild, as the devices that we tested with the service were all connected to the hotel’s WiFi connection. It would be interesting to see how the app and the streaming service would behave in real world conditions when we take it out for a spin later this week.
That’s it for now. We managed to get a one week pass with the service, and we’ll give you the lowdown on the app later this week.
