HBO Nordic review

HBO Nordic rants have been most popular posts of this blog. I realized that I have never reviewed the site. Well, I had not tried it before this. Two years ago HBO announced HBO Nordic streaming service which showed HBO shows same time as in United States. People were excited. Service got postponed and Netflix came without hype. They just announced their service was available in here.

When ViaPlay started to promote their service wind was taken from beneath the HBO Nordics wings. Service got postponed even further. When it was available testing required 13 month contract. First month was free. Netflix and ViaPlay had one month trials without any commitment. Service had technical problems which didn't help at all. All this made fans furious.

All this meant that I was not very interested of trying the service. Later HBO Nordic started to give real trial period with out commitment. HBO is known for its quality shows. But it was not HBO's show that got me to try the service. It was third season of Continuum. I will make videos of that show. So no more of that this time.

HBO Nordic is lot like WWE Network. Both are made by content providers that sell their service by their original content. If you want to stream their content you have to use their service. This means services don't pay too much attention to usability. You can watch the content and that is enough. I reviewed WWE Network earlier here.

In HBO Nordic's case this means lack of search function and autoplay of next episode. You have to go through lists and start every episode you watch. You can add episodes to watch list which helps finding shows later but it is still not too convenient. For some reasons episodes in Watch list show episode name but not show's name.

Movie selection is quite terrible. But lets be honest you don't get HBO Nordic because of movies. Service have enough movie that it can tell it has movies. Tv shows are the reason you get HBO Nordic. Tv shows are not limited to HBO's shows. There are also other shows like Continuum and at least Continuum had newer seasons than Netflix had.

I won't go into HBO's shows. Everyone knows Game of Thrones, True Detective and others. Those are what sell HBO Nordic. It is not user experience. I didn't try iPad application which got quite terrible reviews. Website is not done usability in mind and based on reviews iPad application has even more issues.

At the moment I don't know what I will do with HBO Nordic. I probably give it couple months and decide after that. This means that there will be more current HBO show reviews from now on until I cancel my subscription.