I signed up for Comic-Con HQ today. It’s a paid video streaming service that’s a co-venture of San Diego Comic-Con and Lionsgate. In theory, they should be streaming panels and stuff from Comic-Con this weekend. The service costs $5 per month, and it doesn’t look like there’s really much content up there, so I may cancel the subscription pretty quickly after the con is over. The sign-up process said it was a 30-day trial, but then it said the first billing would be July 25th, so I’m not even sure about the trial period.
In addition to the content from the con, they’ve got some original shows that (in theory) will be releasing new episodes regularly. Plus some random old movies and TV shows. It doesn’t really seem like enough to justify $5 every month.
A number of the shows look to be similar to stuff that was on the old G4 channel, or some of the stuff from Revision3 (before they got bought out). There are a few interesting people showing up. Chris Gore and Robert Meyer Burnett were guests on a movie-related show that I started watching, for instance. The stuff I’ve watched so far seems kind of cheesy, but I haven’t watched much. And their news shows seem to focus on film, TV, and games, with little to no coverage of actual comic books, so that’s a bit disappointing.
I’m wondering if they’ve got enough infrastructure to keep the site up during the actual con, when (I assume) a lot of people will be signing up for trial accounts and trying to watch panels. It’ll be interesting to see how that works out.
Right now, you can watch the content through a web browser or an iOS app. It looks like the iOS app is iPhone and iPad only; I couldn’t find a version for Apple TV, which would have been nice.
You can buy a subscription to the service through their website, or as an “add-on” to Amazon Prime Video. The Amazon option was tempting, since that would have let me watch it via the Amazon app on my TiVo (I assume). But I went the direct route for now and signed up on their site.
I’m really wishing I could be at Comic-Con this weekend, but watching some coverage on the internet is as close as I’m going to get this year.