HBO Now – Review 2020
The most successful on-demand video streaming services focus on building libraries of both past classics and new, compelling original series. HBO Now, HBO’s on-demand streaming service, features premium on-air originals and an extensive on-demand collection of well-regarded shows and movies. Additionally, HBO Now performs without issue in our testing and offers an ad-free experience. That said, HBO Now is pricier than its competitors, lacks support for offline downloads on mobile, and offers neither HDR nor 4K content.
What to Watch
Most people won’t have any trouble finding something to watch on HBO Now. Subscribers can watch HBO originals such as Barry, Curb Your Enthusiasm, His Dark Materials, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Silicon Valley, Succession, and Westworld. You can also take a deep dive into other beloved series such as Big Little Lies, Bored to Death, Deadwood, Game of Thrones, Girls, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, The Wire, and Watchmen. HBO is also home to some excellent current and past miniseries, including Chernobyl, Band of Brothers, Generation Kill, Sharp Objects, The Outsider, and The Young Pope. HBO Now has lots of excellent documentaries, too.
Keep track of everything arriving on HBO by reading our monthly feature about its library changes.
Those shows alone might be enough to convince many people to subscribe, since many of HBO’s flagship shows are also available on other platforms. In fact, Deadwood, Oz, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, and The Wire are all available in their entirety on Amazon Prime Video. HBO does not stream any animated series, let alone anime, which may be an important consideration for some. Both Netflix and Hulu offer options in those genres.
Other categories of content available on HBO Now include Comedy, Sports, Documentaries, Collections, and Late Night. Most of these categories feature scattered lists of productions that subscribers are free to peruse, but these are not the main appeal of the service. If sports are your primary interest, take a look at other entries in our best sports streaming services.
HBO Now has a collection of recent mainstream movies as well as popular films of years past across many genres, including action, comedy, drama, family, and horror/sci-fi. During my last review period, HBO Now’s collection included Atomic Blonde, Dunkirk, the complete Harry Potter collection, The Hitman’s Bodyguard, The Lego Ninjago Movie, Logan, War for the Planet of the Apes, and Wonder Woman, for example. In total, scrolling through the alphabetical list of titles revealed a little over 550 movies, which is impressive. I like that these collections include multiple entries in a film series. For example, HBO Now’s collection included three Die Hard movies, three Back to the Future films, and four entries in the Fast and Furious franchise.
Nowadays, HBO Now is most similar to Netflix in that both have shifted their focus to high-quality originals. It also has parallels with CBS All Access, given that both have extensive back catalogs of high-quality content. Disney+, with its bundling of Disney, Pixar, Star Wars, and Marvel content, also rivals HBO Now in terms of historical quality.
Keep in mind that while there’s no live TV component to HBO Now, many current shows, including Westworld, are available to stream at the same time as they air. One drawback to this approach (for the consumer) is that you can’t watch entire seasons at a time unless you wait until the season ends. When Netflix or Amazon Prime Video releases a season, the whole thing goes live at once. On the one hand, it’s nice to not feel the pressure to binge an entire season to avoid spoilers, but the downside is that you need to keep subscribing to HBO Now for the entirety of its release schedule. CBS All Access employs a similar strategy with the release schedule for Star Trek: Picard.
Pricing and Platform
HBO Now is pricier than its competitors, at $14.99 per month. Hulu and CBS All Access start at $5.99 per month. Both those plans include ads. Apple TV+ only costs $4.99 per month. Prime Video and Netflix start at $8.99 per month, but Netflix’s higher-tier plans are comparable in price to HBO Now at $12.99 and $15.99 per month.
HBO Now supports an impressive number of platforms. In addition to the web, HBO Now is available on Android, iOS, and Fire OS devices. You can also use the service on the PS4, PS3, Xbox One, and Xbox 360. For smart TV users, HBO works on Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, Android TV, Apple TV, Google Chromecast, Roku, and compatible Samsung TVs. HBO Now is a US-only (and some US territories) streaming service, so international audiences will need to turn to other solutions, such as getting the regular HBO channel through a local cable provider.
You can sign up for a 30-day free trial of HBO Now, but this option requires a payment method. HBO does not give a hard limit on how many devices can stream simultaneously, but if you exceed a reasonable number of devices, HBO Now might temporarily kick everyone off the service. BritBox more clearly specifies that it supports five concurrent streams.
What About HBO Go and HBO Max?
To clarify a frequent point of confusion, HBO Now is HBO’s on-demand streaming service and HBO Go is an extension of its cable offering. To use HBO Go, you need to have an existing cable subscription that includes HBO. Both services offer the same content.
HBO Max is an upcoming service that will include all of HBO Now’s content, new originals, selected content from other WarnerMedia properties (such as Warner Bros., New Line Cinema, DC, CNN, and Crunchyroll), and high-profile acquired series such as Dr. Who, Friends, South Park, and The Big Bang Theory. The service will cost $14.99 per month.
Web Interface
HBO Now’s interface on the desktop is clean and elegant with a black backdrop, white text, large thumbnails, and simple menus. Many of the elements are translucent as well, which reminds me a bit of Windows 10’s Fluent visual design. Performance is also quick; I did not experience any lag when searching for shows or navigating through the various sections. Across the top, you can jump directly to Shows, Movies, or More (Comedy, Sports, Documentaries, Collections, Late Night). You can also search for shows directly via the included search interface.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can access your account settings or your Watchlist. Settings break down into a couple of different categories, including the basic account info, billing, and notification settings, but it also builds in a parental control panel. Here, you can set the maximum rating allowed for both Movies and TV shows and lock down these preferences with a four-digit PIN. I prefer the way Netflix and Hulu allow you to set up separate account profiles for each
The default page highlights featured content in a large top-level slider, and a selection of Quick Hits (video snippets related to shows) appears directly below. Horizontal sliders offer another entry point for content categories otherwise accessible via the menu. This page looks a lot like Netflix’s home page, but I do appreciate that HBO Now’s content sliders are directly related to the menus. All of the individual content categories look similar. You can play content directly from any screen or simply add it to your Watchlist. Clicking on a show brings up a brief description, a section for any related video content (such as sneak peeks or interviews), and general information on the cast and crew. HBO Now does not, however, provide any aggregate rating information from Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes, nor does it feature any sort of recommendation engine.
The playback interface is simple and effective with the option to enable subtitles. I would like HBO to implement something similar to Prime Video’s X-Ray feature, which identifies all actors and actresses in a particular scene, tells you about any music playing, and offers fun facts like continuity errors.
HBO Now on Mobile
I tested HBO Now on a Nexus 5X running Android 8.1 and didn’t have any issues signing in to the app. The interface maintains the same visual design as its desktop counterpart. Its simple black-and-white visual scheme and large thumbnails look great, but I wish you could resize the thumbnails to fit more content on the page. Hulu’s app has the same problem; the interface is modern and aesthetically pleasing, but it can be a pain to navigate and discover new shows and movies to watch.
The main app page breaks down into two tabs: Featured (the app displays featured show, movies, and collections) and Quick Hits (video featurettes). You can expand the content categories and access settings from the menu in the upper-left corner. I like that almost all of the options from the web are accessible from the mobile app, but am disappointed that I could not manage my subscription from my phone.
I tested the HBO Now app while connected to PCMag’s Wi-Fi network (50 Mbps download). Given that HBO shows tend to be quite long, make sure to connect to Wi-Fi to avoid outrageous cellular data costs. I launched an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and had no trouble playing back the episode or scrubbing to a new point in the show. In testing, the picture looks sharp and audio sounds crisp.
Other Features and Performance
HBO now does offer closed captions (CC) for most of its shows, but not nearly as many customization options as Acorn TV. You also won’t find shows that support Audio Descriptions, which are audible narrations of character actions and scene changes that may not be obvious from the dialog alone. Many of Netflix’s and Prime Video’s originals support Audio Descriptions. Check out our top streaming tips for HBO Now to make sure you make full use of all its capabilities.
HBO Now does not currently support 4K or HDR content, nor does it allow you to download episodes for offline viewing. Both Netflix and Amazon Prime Video offer all of these capabilities. Hulu also added offline downloads to its service, but only for subscribers to its ad-free plans. Neither 4K nor HDR technologies are new at this point, so it’s disappointing that HBO’s ongoing flagship programming does not support these standards. Many Apple TV+ and Disney+ originals support higher-end video and audio specs. The vast landscapes of Westworld and the industrialized interiors of the Delos Inc. headquarters would look incredible with greater dynamic ranges and sharper textures.
I tested HBO Now over my home network (200Mbps download) in a browser on a Windows 10 machine. During my tests, I streamed episodes of Westworld’s latest season and Six Feet Under, as well as The Fate of the Furious without any lag or performance dips. The one exception to HBO’s lack of ads I saw in my testing was a brief (and skippable) HBO trailer for some of its other
HBO Now and VPN
If you are concerned about your online privacy, a virtual private network (VPN) can help restore some protections. One issue you may run into though is that video streaming services, including HBO Now, may block VPN users from streaming due to content licensing deals or geographic restrictions. HBO Now, for example, is only available for US residents, so this no-VPN policy prevents people in other countries from using such software to gain access.
You may be able to find a VPN that works with your video streaming service of choice, but that solution might not work in the future. Many video streaming services are getting better at shutting down the workarounds that VPNs exploit to bypass detection.
Pure HBO
HBO Now’s main advantage is its excellent original content, including currently airing shows, (such as Succession and Westworld) and classics (such as The Wire and Six Feet Under). Furthermore, HBO Now has excellent apps, does not run any ads, and supports many platforms. However, HBO’s on-demand service lacks the 4K, HDR, and offline viewability you get with Netflix and Amazon Video. HBO Now also costs more than similar services, some of which offer entire HBO series on demand. Still, if watching HBO shows (and especially watching current ones as they air) is important to you, you will enjoy the HBO Now experience. For full-featured alternatives to cable, we recommend Editors’ Choice Netflix for its expansive content library and Editors’ Choices Hulu and YouTube TV for live TV consumption.