HBO's Deal With Apple Is Troubling News for Cord Cutters

​HBO's a-la-carte streaming service, HBO Now, is coming exclusively to the Apple TV for the first three months of its life. Cord-cutters, prepare to be disappointed.

The main appeal of cord cutting has been to free yourself from massive ecosystems offered by traditional cable providers. Until recently, HBO had been one of the channels that kept cable subscribers tied into their contracts—it's tough to leave Comcast when you're addicted to Game of Thrones.

HBO's partnership with Sling, a Dish Network-owned service offering a-la-carte channels, was a great move as HBO dipped its toes into the cable-less world. HBO Now was supposed to the network's chance to fully dive in. Instead, it signals that what's to come isn't as great as we were all hoping.

Cable executives have said that they are confident subscribers will stick with their services because it's annoying to have to search through a Netflix catalog, a Hulu catalog, and an Amazon Prime catalog of shows simply to find what you were looking for.

Now, imagine having to switch devices every time you want you want to switch from watching an HBO show to watching another channel's offering.

"I don't think the cable TV model gets obliterated by the fact that there's Netflix. Someone has to be responsible for aggregation. The jury is out on whether competing ecosystems [like Netflix and Amazon] will work," Jeff Binder, a former Comcast exec working on a new cable startup, said at CES.

Multiply his sentiment tenfold if we're talking about having to switch between different devices to access those competing ecosystems.

We're not there yet. HBO stressed in an email to me that its Apple exclusivity agreement is temporary.

But still, it's taking freedom away from consumers. The Roku 3 offers, by all measures, a better experience than an Apple TV. Now, someone who prefers the Roku or Amazon Fire but really loves Girls is going to have to take a serious look at buying an Apple TV if they want to keep up with their favorite show.

But what happens, hypothetically, if Roku were to buy the rights to an AMC streaming service exclusively? What happens if Amazon Fire TV buys the rights to NFL Sunday Ticket? You see where this is going. Rather than having television freedom, consumers end up either having to buy a bunch of gadgets that all ostensibly do the same thing, or having to stick with traditional cable.

At CES this year, Randall Hounsell, vice president of strategic development at Comcast, said that networks and companies like Roku can't replicate what cable has traditionally done for years.

"There are two parts of the equation: content and experience," he said. "If you're delivering content, there's a good chance you can't deliver the experience."

Instead of having one cord, we'll have many. And that sounds like a pretty crappy experience.