I lost HBO this month. I had streaming-only HBO as an add-on to Amazon Prime, but Prime recently announced that it was ending the service as of September 15. I had a couple weeks to watch the programs on my watch list, and I got through a few of them, but that’s it. No more HBO. I’m not broken up about it. I wasn’t watching it much, anyway. If there is anything else on it that I want to see, I will look for it on DVD at the library, or wait in the hopes that it will someday be offered on a streaming service that I have access to.
HBO was my one paid TV indulgence. I don’t have cable television, just broadcast. And the only streaming services I pay for are the ones I was paying for before they were in the streaming business — PBS Passport and Amazon Prime. I only had HBO at all because I signed up for the cut-rate streaming-only HBO service a few years back, through Prime. I did it so I could watch the final season of Game of Thrones rather than wait for it to come out on DVD, as I had with previous seasons. After that series ended, there was something else coming out soon that I wanted to see. And then something else. And I never actually stopped the service, though lately I had been considering it, because HBO seemed to have less and less that interested me.
Once I knew my HBO was going away this month, I rushed to see some of the selections I did have on my watch list. I watched a couple of movies I’d been meaning to see — Life of Pi and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. And I sped through a wonderful Italian series, My Brilliant Friend, which unfortunately ended on a cliffhanger at the close of the second season; the third season isn’t out yet. Even when it is, I won’t have HBO to see it on. Maybe I’ll read the book.
The Petrini Page 