Showtime Will Launch Its Own Standalone Streaming Service So You Won’t Have to Pirate Penny Dreadful

On the heels of HBO’s announcement that they’ll finally be offering a non-cable-provider-based streaming service, it looks like Showtime will be launching one of their own. Your days of dodging malware to get your favorite shows without an expensive cable package are coming to an end! Not that any of you would do anything illegal…

In an investor call this morning, CBS Corp (owner of Showtime) CEO Les Moonves said that the “floodgate is now open.” He told the Deutsche Bank Securities 2015 Media, Internet, and Telecom Conference that we can expect Showtime’s service to debut “in the not-too-distant future,” because “the days of the 500 channel universe are over,” according to /Film.

There aren’t any other details yet, but it’ll likely be priced to compete with HBO Now, which comes in at $14.95 exclusively on Apple services. Hopefully it’ll be a bit less, as $15.00 is a bit much for a single channel in this bold new TV landscape, but it sure beats having to pay for an entire package of regular cable channels on top of whatever extra subscription costs premium channels amount to on your cable provider of choice.

Or does it? For me it does, because cutting out cable TV took $70 off my cable and Internet package—and I didn’t even have any premium channels—and Hulu, HBO, and Showtime would only add back about $40 of that if Showtime and HBO wind up with the same price, all while giving me more content I actually want to watch than I had before. (I don’t count Netflix, because I already had that on top of my cable cost before I “cut the cord.”)

I’d be interested to hear how the math works out for everyone else. Let me know in the comments.

(via /Film)

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