The offer of Xbox One, Microsoft’s latest flagship gaming console and entertainment center, has become much richer with the addition of Home Box Office’s online streaming service, HBO Go. The service has become available for Xbox One consoles today, Cnet reports. Alas, the service has still not cut its cords – it is still only available to subscribers of the paid channel. This is not the independent web-only streaming service HBO plans to launch in the near future.
With HBO Go, subscribers of the paid movie channel gain access to the entire media library of the channel, including a great variety of original content like The Sopranos and Game of Thrones. The service was available for the previous Xbox generation – Xbox 360 – and the PlayStation 3 console by Sony, it was not made accessible for owners of the latest generation gaming systems. Microsoft announced back in the summer that Xbox One users will get their HBO Go service until the end of the year – and has kept its promise. Now users of the latest Microsoft consoles have access to a truly diverse media offering – along with HBO Go, they have access to services like Hulu Plus, Netflix, Amazon and others.
Gaming consoles are not just for gaming anymore. They offer their users a variety of other services as well, and this turns them into veritable entertainment hubs – and their manufacturers keep reminding us of this. Sony and Microsoft – currently the leaders of the console market – are an increasingly important providers of entertainment – now gaming consoles are the most common device to access Netflix, according to a study cited by Cnet. By adding HBO Go to their lineup, Microsoft and Sony hope to attract more users to their devices, away from web browsers and other devices used by them to access HBO streaming content until now. And, as HBO has about 50 million subscribers in the US only, there is a huge user base to count on. Add this to the major discounts offered by them for Black Friday…