The Frustrating State of Media Licensing

I'm a former pirate. Didn't pay for a single song, television show, or movie throughout middle or high school. Then I grew up, got a respectable job, and understood the economy of creative content and wanted to give back to the creators of such masterpieces as True Detective.

That means I'll need to pay the $15 a month for HBO. There are many ways to do that, and luckily I have a cable subscription, mostly for my father to watch Judge Judy. With a range of new-ish televisions running Android TV and LG's webOS, surely getting HBO streaming through an app won't be difficult. They offer both HBO GO for those who pay through their cable provider, like I did, and HBO NOW, for those who pay elsewhere.

Let's get the HBO GO app installed on Android TV. That worked. Now let's log in with Xfinity. "Device not supported." Too bad. Turns out Comcast does not allow you to use the HBO GO app to access your subscription. My experience with Comcast through multiple FCC complaints over the years leaves me no more puzzled or angry than watching a lion eat a gazelle. That's what it does.

Alright, I'll cancel my HBO subscription through Comcast and subscribe directly to HBO NOW. I'll have to contact them to transfer my username and watch list. Sorry, we don't do that. Make a new ID. Fine, I sign up for HBO NOW and repopulated the list. It even works on my Android TV. Let's install it on this 2019 LG TV. Strange, no apps in the LG store match "HBO." It turns out Samsung purchased exclusive smart TV rights to HBO in America. So let's cancel HBO NOW and try another way. It can also be purchased through Hulu and Amazon Prime Video. Both of those apps are pretty ubiquitous, so I went with Prime Video. Problem mostly solved, at least for HBO.

Though Picard on CBS isn't mastered in 4K, it certainly appears to be graded for HDR, yet my TV does not show the HDR popup in the corner when it starts playing. Is the CBS All Access app to blame? Based on a cursory forum search, it is. Let's try a CBS trial through Amazon. Nope, not HDR either. I also have an Apple TV 4K box. Let's try connecting that and installing the CBS app. The box uses HDR from the moment it's turned on; it could easily be stretching the dynamic range of every signal to HDR, so that's inconclusive.

There's also a newly-released Apple TV app for LG webOS TVs which only switches to HDR if the source is in HDR. I'll log into my CBS account from there. There's no option to do so? I can only buy a new CBS subscription through Apple, and the $7 commercial plan isn't even available - only the $10 plan. They're all trials, so I'll give it a whirl. Sure enough Picard is indeed available in HDR, but for me, only through the Apple TV app.

This is the journey to stream just a couple of stations and one show. That was compounded greatly in making a diagram for my father to find his preferred shows among a dozen Roku apps - mostly met with failure. How often do you find yourself searching "where can I stream…?" Thankfully there is an Xfinity Stream app for Roku which emulates a cable box. When run on my 2019 LG TV, this app fails to recognize it's connected to my home network, an odd prerequisite considering Xfinity cable packages cost a small fortune. Why would I be restricted to streaming only over their metered network?

This disaster plays out in the purchased movie content world as well. Maybe you were fearful of DRM like I was and carefully purchased UltraViolet-backed movies so at least some semi-agnostic digital locker agreed you owned the rights to a movie. Now that it went under, I'm left hoping Walmart (Vudu), Disney (Movies Anywhere), Fandango (Comcast and AT&T), Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Comcast agree on which movies I own. Despite them all being connected, Disney thinks I have 388 while Walmart puts the count at 555, a vast disparity caused by varying levels of movie studio cooperation. Interested in buying TV shows? Then be very careful when you guess the prevailing service among those, as there's absolutely no peering of "owned" TV shows.