Adults, Watch on TV, Charging and more

29 mayo, 2020, by Santiago Comment

HBO GO is a streaming service for movies and series similar to Netflix, although slightly more expensive (12.99 per month for two simultaneous devices), with less content and with some technical flaws that, at least for its Android app, has earned it a reputation of 2.7 / 5 in the Play Store.

I subscribed for about two months to the service, particularly for my interest in watching Game of Thrones, since it is the only platform in Latin America that transmits it. But beyond the content, here I will focus on the applications of the service and how it works, things that I have managed to solve and others that have been impossible.

Delete the «Adults» menu

To remove the “Adults” section from the main menu, you must activate parental control in your HBO GO account. You can do this from the mobile app settings or from the web version of HBO GO. Just uncheck the “R” (adult content) box and save your changes. Thus the option “Adults” will disappear from the side menu.

The downside of doing this is that you must set up a PIN, which you must enter every time you want to watch other adult content on HBO GO, such as Game of Thrones and any movies or series with objectionable content. In any case, this can be regulated with the other parental control options. The “PG” option will allow you to view content for over 13 years and “G” content for “All public” without entering a PIN. In both cases, any content outside of these categories does not disappear from your account like the adult section. It will continue to be visible but in order to see it, the PIN must be entered.

Watch on tv

Fortunately, the latest version of the HBO GO application for Android already allows streaming to Chromecast or Android TV (which could not be said for old versions of the app, where the button generally did not appear). However, this will not do you much good if you have an Amazon Fire Stick TV, which apparently does not support this technology (unless you use AirScreen, although it is not the same).

Error «Not in service area» de HBO Go en Amazon Fire TV Stick

In the case of these devices, you must install the APK of HBO GO for Android TV. It is likely that these devices already have the HBO GO application in their application catalog but surely when you open it you will see the error “Not available in your region” or something similar. This is because that pre-installed application is usually the United States version and you will not be able to use it if you are in Latin America (unless you use a VPN).

So the trick is to uninstall that US version of HBO GO and install the HBO GO Android TV APK for Latin America. In the case of the Amazon Fire TV Stick, it can be done from the “Downloader” application that you can download from the same app store. Select the “Browser” tab and there you must search Google for the APK Android TV of HBO GO for Latin America that you can find on the APK Mirror site.

Once the APK is downloaded, you will have to activate the “Apps of unknown origin” on the device to allow installation.

Stays loading

HBO GO stops or cuts all the time

From my experience, HBO GO needs an optimal internet connection to work well. If there is any problem with it, it starts to get stuck. I had this situation due to my unstable Internet connection. Once optimized, installing a new router, the problem disappeared. However, I must admit that this only happened to me with HBO GO, because despite my old router, Netflix worked fine.

Does not save language and subtitles for all chapters

This is a problem for which I have not found a solution. It is necessary to switch to Spanish and deactivate subtitles in each chapter of a series. The change was not maintained as it happens with Netflix or Amazon Prime.

Others

• Another problem that I had with HBO GO is that sometimes the last chapter seen was not saved or up to where it had been seen when the connection was lost. I had to go find it in the catalog and find the part where I stayed.
• There is also the issue of tokens. The next day I usually always saw the notice “The token is expired.” In this case, you only had to restart the app (Force stop by pressing and holding on its icon, “Information” option).

Conclution

The HBO GO catalog is not as large as that of Netflix or Amazon Prime, errors in the software such as not saving language changes in the series, handling of tokens that ruin the experience, a lack of optimization to function acceptably in connections « Slow ”and not saving pending view changes are issues on this platform so I wouldn’t recommend it as a primary streaming service. Perhaps as a second option, especially if you haven’t seen Game of Thrones. Something that I’ve seen interesting about her is the odd relatively recent movie, released only a few months ago. Let’s hope that all your technical problems in the apps are not inherited by the new service that is to come, HBO Max.

How to watch movies online on Chromecast (Cast to TV)

How to watch movies online on Amazon Fire TV Stick

Popcorn Time for Android (Free Movies): 4.0+, Chromecast and VPN supported