do you really think they will make the $1 billion in profits with direct to consumer?
they have around 27 million subscribers. figure $10 per month for each one that's over $3 billion in revenue per year.
do you really think they will match by selling the shows direct to consumer? if they shut the station down to only producing the content like game of thrones and not airing reruns of movies or bill mahr they still wouldn't generate the same profit
They could sell direct to consumer alone and continue to sell the subscription service. I see no reason those should be mutually exclusive. I don't know if they could make $1 billion in profits still with both. I would think they could though. Just charge the same price (or more even) for the direct to video offering. People who want HBO can buy it two different ways now, and some people will surely buy the direct video offering that would not have paid the extra cost for cable subscription + HBO cost. They're already paying all the costs for HBO Go now, because it already exists. They just don't sell it standalone...you have to buy a cable subscriptions to get access.
Why wouldn't they stream the reruns and bill mahr or whatever on steaming? AFAIK they already do that. Its not like it costs them anything other than hard drive space on the server, it essentially doesn't matter what you're watching on the streaming service since the load is the same. HBO owns all its shows, it can do whatever the hell it wants with them without licensing issues that plague other streaming services. I learned that from the article.
Do you mean selling shows one at a time? Because they rent you the whole shebang right now for the cost of your dish/cable HBO subscription price. If they can afford to offer it now, they could afford to offer it alone.