Thanks to an HBO Go crash Sunday night, some viewers don’t know what befell Matthew McConaughey’s fallen dic on “True Detective.”
Credit: Lacey Terrell
If you’re one of those who have no idea how “True Detective” ended Sunday night — whether or not Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson located the “Yellow King,” what befell McConaughey’s bottoming-out dic, and what he did with all those beer can figures he sculpted — you’re not alone. Last night so many people were trying to log onto the on-demand service HBO Go that the site crashed. Left with nothing to fill their life with, they were forced to mobilize the old fashioned way: by complaining on Twitter and hoping some journo screengrabs them.
Does this mean a seismic shift in HBO Go’s rules? Currently they’re shockingly lax, given that they’re a major conglomerate who can do a show with a famous actor destined for his first Oscar. If you have an HBO Go subscription, you can share it with up to five others, and their usage will not interfere with your own. (Netflix Instant, to name one streaming giant, does not do this. If you’re watching “Ghostbusters II,” someone you gave your code to cannot watch “Hellraiser II.”) Predictably, many have done just that, and the no doubt many duplicate accounts no doubt led to a serious clog.
But don’t freak and order your own pricy HBO subscription. No less than HBO CEO Richard Plepler has said as recently as January that he’s cool with the code sharing. “It’s not that we aren’t unmindful of it, but it has no real effect on our business,” he crowed during a BuzzFeed event. He looks at it as marketing, allowing the content to spread more easily. After all, to get HBO Go you have to become an HBO subscriber. Of course, at this point, how many of you are still cable subscribers?
