The outdated Hollywood mentality fears the plethora of online streaming services that have popped up in recent years, as they pose a direct threat to raditional cable and satellite services.
As such, it comes as little surprise that a number streaming applications in the wild out there seem rather halfhearted, with less-than-stellar support for certain devices, erratic streaming quality and arbitrary limitations.
Two noteworthy apps that are currently slapped with limitations? HBO’s Go and the Cinemax mobile application, neither of which support HDMI output by default.
We can only assume this basic feature was turned off by default by HBO and Cinemax because they don’t want people streaming the content on their phone and viewing it on the big-screen TV in the living room – even if they have a subscription via participating cable or satellite company to access content on the streaming apps. Rather, the pay TV channels want users to subscribe via cable or satellite, at least in the living room.
Fortunately, a hacker over on XDA Forums by the name HBOTroll1 has come up with a method of modifying the HBO Go and Cinemax APKs to enable HDMI output support.
So I recently got HBO and was disappointed to see that the HBO GO app didn’t support HDMI out. I thought this strange since I had never seen anything else that didn’t support HDMI out, so you would think HBO would be able to figure it out if everyone else did,” he explained.
“So I read a few tutorials and here’s what I came up with… I have a Droid 4, so I know it works on Motorola phones. I think it should work on all other phones too, but I only have the one phone so it hasn’t been tested on any others.”
Interested? You can check out the original thread here.
